The study of epistemic issues in conversation focuses on the knowledge claims that interactants assert, contest, and defend in turns at talk and sequences of interaction. Epistemic issues permeate all the topics that conversation analysts study and are central to ‘recipient design’ – the ways in which speakers design their talk to accommodate the specifics of the context and the particular others who are their interlocutors. However, the study of epistemics is complicated by the fact that CA methodology permits the attribution of subjective knowledge to participants as a part of the analytic process only if the attribution is grounded in the data of interaction. While this stipulation has tended to inhibit research on epistemics in the past, the development of the notion of epistemic stance has enabled researchers to focus on how persons present themselves as more or less knowledgeable, and have those claims upheld or contested by others. This chapter identifies and illustrates seven sources of evidence that can be used, separately and in combination, to ground analytical claims about epistemic stance and status in conversational interaction. The analysis of epistemics is shown to have deep continuities with general conversation analytic procedures used across the field.

Conversation Analysis (CA) is a major contributing discipline to the study of language use and social action in context. Originating in the discipline of sociology, it forms the basis for the burgeoning field of interactional linguistics. This chapter offers an overview of major themes in the field. Beginning with a brief discussion of the intellectual background of the field, the chapter sketches three distinctive levels of analysis: sequential organization, practices of turn construction, and the organization of these practices as sets of resources for dealing with recurrent problems in the social organization of interaction. Sections of the chapter deal with sequence organization, preference, turn design, the fitting of talk to specific contexts and recipients (recipient design), progressivity, multimodality, and interaction in the context of specific social institutions such as medicine, legal discourse, and news conferences.

Social actions are recipient-designed actions that occur in the context of interaction sequences. This chapter focuses on sources and practices for the formation and ascription of social actions. While linguists stress the relevance of linguistic social action formats, conversation analysts highlight the relevance of the sequentialposition of an action, and sociolinguists point to the influence of social identities for action-formation and -ascription. The combination of these three approaches helps us to solve the analytic problem of indirectness, which, however, only rarely becomes a problem for the participants in an interaction themselves. Social properties which recurrently apply when using verbal and bodily resources of action-formation, i.e. the social actions themselves, inferred meanings, projected next actions, the participation framework, the activity type, speaker’s stance, participants’ identities, etc. lead to stable pragmatic connotations of those forms, i.e. action-meanings, which become idiomatic and part of our common-sense competence. Still, social actions are multi-layered and can be ambiguous at times. Therefore, their meaning can be open for negotiation. Intersubjectivity of action ascription is ultimately secured neither by conventions nor by speaker’s intentions, but is accomplished by their treatment in subsequent discourse

The chapter claims that speaker’s utterance when formulating intention is shaped not only by recipient design but also by salience effect. While fitting words into actual situational contexts the speaker is driven not only by the intent that the hearer recognizes what is meant as intended by the speaker, but also by individual salience that affects production subconsciously. The interplay of these social (recipient design) and individual factors (salience) shapes speaker utterance. Recipient design usually results in inductive sequences while salience effect triggers a deductive sequence.

This chapter takes a closer look at speaker production in ELF by introducing a dialogic approach to the analysis of a newly-established category that was called “Odd Structures”. OSs put forth contradictory or frame-breaking information. In violating particular patterns, they potentially put mutual understanding and successful communication between interlocutors at risk. However, the important thing is that OSs do not necessarily lead to non-understanding or misunderstandings between ELF interlocutors. They can be unnoticed, unreacted, or reacted as if no oddness has occurred. It is argued and demonstrated that a dialogic turn-by-turn, action–reaction approach to discourse segments will give us a better understanding of how these structures are created and deployed.