The exploration of participants managing knowledge and navigating epistemic territories in everyday interaction constitutes a well-established influential field of investigation in conversation analysis and interactional linguistics today (cf. Heritage, 2012). Over the last decade, there has been a major increase of research focusing on epistemics, which correlatively led to an increasing number of conferences and workshops on that matter.
The conference “Knowledge in talk-in-interaction / Les savoirs dans la parole-en-interaction” hosted by the University of Lausanne represented a timely opportunity to get a comprehensive overview of the field of epistemics in interactions, while also offering insights into the future directions of this field.
This hybrid conference was held from the 6th to the 8th of November and was organized by Jérôme Jacquin, Ana Keck and Clotilde Robin (Université de Lausanne) as part of the project “Prendre une position épistémique dans l’interaction. Les marqueurs du savoir, du non-savoir et du doute en français” (“Taking an epistemic position in interaction. Markers of knowing, non-knowing and doubt in French”), funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation [project n°100012_188924]. This bilingual conference unfolded through two parallel sessions, one in French and one in English, encompassing more than 25 contributions and four plenary speakers.
Three major lines of research on knowledge in interaction were investigated during these three days: the embodied dimension of knowledge, the expression of knowledge in institutional settings, and the methodological issues raised by the study of knowledge in interaction.
Embodied knowledge in complex ecologies
The integration of the embodied dimension of talk-in-interaction into the study of epistemics was admirably demonstrated through two of the keynote presentations and several different talks.
Through her plenary talk which was built from a collaborative project, Simona Pekarek Doehler (Université de Neuchâtel) demonstrated, by comparing five typologically different languages (Czech, French, Hebrew, Mandarin, Romanian), how specific embodied conducts can be associated with the construction ‘I don’t know’. She showed the array of different actions carried out by speakers when deploying the construction in interaction along with specific embodied conducts, such as claiming a lack of knowledge or prefacing a dispreferred response. Her talk sparked an interesting discussion on the “grammaticalization” of gesture and embodied actions which resonated with the presentation provided by two other teams of scholars on distinct embodied conducts. Alexandra Gubina (Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache) & Emma Betz (University of Waterloo) focused on the distinction between one-sided and two-sided shoulder lifts and the way these two embodied variants are used to accomplish different complementary actions, while Alexandra Groß (Universität Bayreuth) and Carolin Dix (Universität Innsbruck) investigated a less-studied embodied action, namely protruding one’s lips. These two talks skillfully demonstrated how the expression and management of knowledge in interaction cannot be reduced to its verbal dimension and needs to integrate the body as a pervasive feature.
Besides its corporeal dimension, the local ecology of the interaction was also shown to constitute a major feature in the study of knowledge-in-interaction. This was brilliantly exposed through Johanna Miecznikowski’s (Università della Svizzera Italiana) plenary talk on the embodied nature of noticings. Working with video recordings of naturally occurring interactions, she illustrated how speakers orient their co-participants’ attention to identify the source of information, that is how knowledge for noticing was acquired, using verbal as well as embodied resources. Her talk thus encouraged a consideration of evidentiality – marking the source of information – not merely as tied to prior knowledge acquired through verbal interactions but also as acquired in situ within the complex ecology of the interaction.
Knowledge and expertise in institutional interactions
Numerous contributions worked with data recorded in diverse institutional settings. In these contexts, as Lorenza Mondada (Universität Basel) stated in her talk on scientific work in a forensic anthropology laboratory, knowledge is not so much a matter of subjective opinion but rather one of expertise.
In this respect, Anne-Sylvie Horlacher and Evelyne Berger’s (Institut et Haute Ecole de la Santé La Source) research demonstrated that being an expert in a learning environment means being able to address professional matters in a recipient designed manner, which is adjusted to the epistemic status of the participants. Bearing on the idea of recipient design, Spencer Hazel showed how the format of instructed actions is consequential for the understanding that people with dementia have of them.
Other contributions illustrated that enacting an expert epistemic stance is a methodical accomplishment within interaction and not pre-determined by the institutional identities of the participants. For instance, by contrasting encounters in a cheese shop with encounters in a clothing repair shop, Moa Hogafors (Laboratoire ICAR) demonstrated how the service providers in the second context establish themselves as having a lower epistemic status than the clients; this is not the case within the first context. Similarly, Eva Ogierman (King’s College London) worked on recordings of tutoring sessions and described how tutors come to express their epistemic stance using hedging and various lexical items.
Methodological issues: expanding toward longitudinal and cross-linguistic perspectives
As Arnulf Deppermann’s (Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache) plenary talk illustrated, knowledge and the way it is acquired constitutes a challenging subject to study within the frame of conversation analysis as it is not accessible per se by the participants and analysts. He therefore proposed a longitudinal analysis of the participants’ interactional histories in order to gain access to the emergence of shared knowledge between the interactants over the course of several interactions. Deppermann remarkably illustrated how to apply such an innovative methodological perspective to the study of knowledge in interaction by considering the emergence of common ground in psychotherapy sessions and the effects interactional histories have on action formation, lexical choices, as well as on sequence formats.
The growing importance of using longitudinal data was also shown by Tiziana Kowalczuk and Melissa Juillet’s (Université de Neuchâtel) talk on the epistemic particle “tu sais” [you know]. The diversification of uses of this format L2 French speakers progressively master was shown to be an expression of the learners’ increasing interactional competence. In the same vein, Clotilde Georges (Université de Lorraine) showed how the epistemic asymmetry between a cooking chef and his apprentice evolves throughout the years as the apprentice improves his competence, and the way this redistribution of knowledge gets enacted within the multimodal unfolding of the interaction.
Another methodological issue was tackled by Karolina Grzech’s plenary talk (Universitat de València): the study of under-described. This topic lead to the consideration of how different languages encode the “source of information” with various linguistic means. Her talk thus highlighted the advantages of adopting a cross-linguistic perspective in order to better grasp the full diversity of what constitutes epistemics in interaction.
Knowledge in Talk-in-Interaction: future directions
The conference “Knowledge in Talk-in-Interaction” was organized following the success of the first edition of a similar conference “Sources of knowledge in talk-in-interaction” ( held in 2022 in Lugano, Switzerland). With its format which favored close discussions between the participants, while at the same time offering a significant overview of the diversity of research that is being led worldwide on knowledge in interaction, this second edition of the KNOWINT conference constituted a significant event in the field of epistemics in interaction.
Drawing on the successful outcomes of both of these conferences, the organizers are currently working on a third edition to be held outside of Switzerland, thus signaling promising prospects for the ongoing growth of this ascending cycle of conferences.
For more information on the conference, you can visit the website (https://wp.unil.ch/knowint2023/) and take a look at the book of abstracts for a more detailed view of the contributions (https://wp.unil.ch/knowint2023/files/2023/11/Book-of-Abstracts.pdf).
Three of the plenary speakers (from left to right): Arnulf Deppermann, Johanna Miecznikowski and Simona Pekarek Doehler
Roundtable on the management and reusability of interactional spoken language data
As part of the conference program, a roundtable was organized, featuring Johanna Miecznikowski, Jérôme Jacquin, Martin Luginbühl, Lorenza Mondada and Simona Pekarek Doehler, all members of the project “Data-sharing skills in corpus-based research on talk-in-interaction“. This project funded by Swissuniversities unites scholars from four Swiss universities working with interactional spoken language data. It aims at reflecting upon the opportunities and challenges researchers face when processing and managing audio-/video-recorded talk-in-interaction as open research data, that is, data that is shared and reused in different scientific fields and for different purposes.
The project develops around a series of workshops. The first was held in Lugano on April 28th and led to the publication of two articles (one reporting on the unfolding of the workshop and the other reflecting upon the technical and ethical management of sensitive data in talk-in-interaction). A second workshop took place in Basel on the 7th and 8th of December 2023 and focused on the possibilities and constraints of using large machine-readable linguistic corpora for studies in the fields of conversation analysis and interactional linguistics. A third workshop was organized in Neuchâtel on the 15th and 16th of January 2024 and addressed the design of annotation schemes for large linguistic corpora with the aim of long-term preservation and usability of the data.
The roundtable was an occasion to get researchers working with interactional data from different parts of the globe to exchange their views and experiences when it comes to collecting and sharing audio-video recorded data. The discussion covered various topics including the “authenticity” of recorded interactions, the drafting of appropriate consent forms, procedures for de-identifying sensitive data and the lack of well-established community guidelines and standards.