Cover not available
Part of
Responding to Polar Questions across Languages and Contexts
Edited by Galina B. Bolden, John Heritage and Marja-Leena Sorjonen
[Studies in Language and Social Interaction 35] 2023
► pp. 139–178

Chapter 5
Three practices for confirming inferences in French talk-in-interaction

Repetition, voilà, and exact(ement)

| Uppsala University

Three practices for doing confirmation in French are investigated (repetition, the particle voilà and the adverb/adjective exact(ement)) as responses to inferences, i.e., requests for confirmation that display some understanding of prior talk. While broadly restricted to the context of inferences, at a level of finer action-sequential granularity the paper looks in turn at responses to four different types of inference-making confirmation-seeking first pair parts. The analyses show how each confirmation practice does slightly different work depending on the type of initiating action, while some commonalities also hold for each confirmation practice across inference-types. Through repetitional confirmation, confirmers claim authorship over what is inferred. With voilà-confirmations, confirmers attribute some epistemic agency to the interlocutor with respect to the forming of the confirmable understanding. By confirming with exact(ement), confirmers treat the inference-producer as having reached the proffered understanding even more independently. The findings reveal both more context-free and more context-sensitive aspects of the work done by the response forms.

Keywords: French, confirmations, response tokens, epistemics, inferences, collaborative completions, other-continuations, candidate understandings, formulations
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background: Response types in French and other languages
  • 3.Confirming inferences
    • 3.1Types of inferences
    • 3.2Digression: Marked and unmarked confirmations
    • 3.3Collaborative completions
      • 3.3.1Collaborative completion + repetition
      • 3.3.2Collaborative completion + voilà
      • 3.3.3Collaborative completion + exact(ement)
    • 3.4Other-continuations
      • 3.4.1Other-continuation + repetition
      • 3.4.2Other-continuation + voilà
      • 3.4.3Other-continuation + exact(ement)
    • 3.5Replacing candidate understandings
      • 3.5.1Replacing candidate understanding + repetition
      • 3.5.2Replacing candidate understanding + voilà
      • 3.5.3Replacing candidate understanding + exact(ement)
    • 3.6Formulations
      • 3.6.1Formulation + repetition
      • 3.6.2Formulation + voilà
      • 3.6.3Formulation + exact(ement)
  • 4.Concluding discussion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 27 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slsi.35.05per
References
Bruxelles, Sylvie, and Véronique Traverso
2006 “Usages de la particule voilà dans une réunion de travail [Uses of the particle voilà in a work meeting].” In Les marqueurs discursifs dans les langues romanes, ed. by Martina Drescher, and Barbara Frank-Job, 71–92. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Delahaie, Juliette
2009 “Oui, voilà ou d’accord ? Enseigner les marqueurs d’accord en classe de FLE [Oui, voilà or d’accord? Teaching agreement markers in French as a Foreign Language classes].” Synergies Pays Scandinaves 4: 17–34.Google Scholar
Deppermann, Arnulf
2015 “Retrospection and Understanding in Interaction”. In Temporality in Interaction, ed. by Arnulf Deppermann and Susanne Günthner, 57–94. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2018 “Inferential Practices in Social Interaction: A Conversation-Analytic Account.” Open Linguistics 4: 35–55. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Enfield, N. J. and Jack Sidnell
2015 “Language Structure and Social Agency: Confirming Polar Questions in Conversation.” Linguistics Vanguard 1: 131–143. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Enfield, N. J., Tanya Stivers, Penelope Brown, Christina Englert, Katariina Harjunpää, Makoto Hayashi, Trine Heinemann, et al.
2019 “Polar Answers.” Journal of Linguistics 55: 277–304. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heritage, John
1985 “Analyzing News Interviews: Aspects of the Production of Talk for an Overhearing Audience”. In Handbook of Discourse Analysis, ed. by Teun A. van Dijk, 95–117. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Heritage, John. and Geoffrey Raymond
2012 “Navigating Epistemic Landscapes: Acquiescence, Agency and Resistance in Responses to Polar Questions.” In Questions: Formal, Functional and Interactional Perspectives, ed. by Jan P. de Ruiter, 179–92. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heritage, John. and Marja-Leena Sorjonen
1994 “Constituting and Maintaining Activities across Sequences: And-Prefacing as a Feature of Question Design.” Language in Society 23: 1–29. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heritage, John. and Rod Watson
1979 “Formulations as Conversational Objects”. In Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology, ed. by George Psathas, 123–62. New York: Irvington.Google Scholar
1980 “Aspects of the Properties of Formulations in Natural Conversations: Some Instances Analysed.” Semiotica 30: 245–62. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jefferson, Gail
1972 “Side Sequences.” In Studies in Social Interaction, edited by David Sudnow, 294–338. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
1987 “On Exposed and Embedded Correction in Conversation.” In Talk and Social Organisation, edited by Graham Button and John R. E. Lee, 86–100. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Keevallik, Leelo
2010 “Minimal Answers to Yes/No Questions in the Service of Sequence Organization.” Discourse Studies 12: 283–309. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kendrick, Kobin H.
2015 “Other-Initiated Repair in English.” Open Linguistics 1: 164–90. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
König, Ekkehard, and Peter Siemund
2007 “Speech Act Distinctions in Grammar.” In Language Typology and Syntactic Description, ed. by Timothy Shopen, 2nd ed., I:276–324. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lerner, Gene H.
1991 “On the Syntax of Sentences-in-Progress.” Language in Society 20: 441–58. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1996 “On the “Semi-Permeable” Character of Grammatical Units in Conversation: Conditional Entry into the Turn Space of Another Speaker.” In Interaction and Grammar, ed. by Elinor Ochs, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Sandra A. Thompson, 238–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2004 “Collaborative Turn Sequences.” In Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation, ed. by Gene H. Lerner, 225–56. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Li, Ingrid Sato
2007 “Exactly: Exercising Entitlement in Next Turn (abstract).” 57th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association. San Francisco.
Mondada, Lorenza
1999 “L’organisation séquentielle des ressources linguistiques dans l’élaboration collective des descriptions [The sequential organization of linguistic resources in the collective development of descriptions].” Langage et société 89: 9–36. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2018 “Turn-Initial Voilà in Closings in French: Reaffirming Authority and Responsibility over the Sequence.” In Between Turn and Sequence: Turn-Initial Particles across Languages, ed. by John Heritage and Marja-Leena Sorjonen, 371–411. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nicolas, Pascale, Sabine Letellier-Zarshenas, Igor Schadle, Jean-Yves Antoine, and Jean Caelen
2002 “Towards a Large Corpus of Spoken Dialogue in French That Will Be Freely Available: The “Parole Publique” Project and Its First Realisations.” In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, 649–54. Las Palmas: European Language Resources Association.Google Scholar
Oloff, Florence
2014 “L’évaluation des complétions collaboratives : Analyse séquentielle et multimodale de tours de parole co-construits [Evaluating collaborative completions: Sequential and multimodal analysis of co-constructed turns at talk].” In Actes Du 4e Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française (Berlin), ed. by Franck Neveu, Peter Blumenthal, Linda Hriba, Annette Gerstenberg, Judith Meinschaefer, and Sophie Prévost, 2125–45. Les Ulis: EDP Sciences. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2016 “Comparaison de l’emploi de deux marqueurs d’affirmation dans des séquences de co-construction: Voilà et genau [Comparison of the use of two affirmation markers in co-construction sequences: Voilà and genau].” Testi e Linguaggi 10: 243–67.Google Scholar
Persson, Rasmus
2014 Ressources linguistiques pour la gestion de l’intersubjectivité dans la parole en interaction. Analyses conversationnelles et phonétiques [Linguistic resources for managing intersubjectivity in talk-in-interaction. Conversation analytic and phonetic studies]. Lund University.Google Scholar
2015 “Registering and Repair-Initiating Repeats in French Talk-in-Interaction.” Discourse Studies 17: 583–608. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Raymond, Geoffrey
2003 “Grammar and Social Organization: Yes/No Interrogatives and the Structure of Responding.” American Sociological Review 68: 939–67. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sacks, Harvey
1995 Lectures on Conversation: Volumes I & II. Oxford: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sacks, Harvey. and Emanuel A. Schegloff
1979 “Two Preferences in the Organization of Reference to Persons in Conversation and Their Interaction.” In Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology, ed. by George Psathas, 15–21. New York: Irvington.Google Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel A.
1996 “Confirming Allusions: Toward an Empirical Account of Action.” American Journal of Sociology 102: 161–216. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2007 Sequence Organization in Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sidnell, Jack
2012 “Turn-Continuation by Self and by Other.” Discourse Processes 49: 314–37. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sorjonen, Marja-Leena
2001 Responding in Conversation: A Study of Response Particles in Finnish. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2018 “Reformulating Prior Speaker’s Turn in Finnish: Turn-Initial siis, eli(kkä), and nii(n) et(tä).” In Between Turn and Sequence: Turn-Initial Particles across Languages, ed. by John Heritage and Marja-Leena Sorjonen, 251–85. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stivers, Tanya
2005 “Modified Repeats: One Method for Asserting Primary Rights from Second Position.” Research on Language & Social Interaction 38: 131–58. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2019 “How We Manage Social Relationships through Answers to Questions: The Case of Interjections.” Discourse Processes 56: 191–209. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thompson, Sandra A., Barbara A. Fox, and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen
2015 Grammar in Everyday Talk: Building Responsive Actions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wootton, Anthony J.
1989 “Remarks on the Methodology of Conversation Analysis.” In Conversation: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, ed. by Peter Bull and Derek Roger, 238–58. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar