RECEIPTING INFORMATION

When dealing with actions that are done to inform, such as news, reports, and answers to questions, recipients have a whole array of verbal responsive practices at their disposal that they can provide upon completion of that informing action, each showing a different orientation to that informing action and varying in agency (Thompson, Fox, & Couper-Kuhlen Reference Thompson, Fox; and Couper-Kuhlen2015). The projected response to an informing action is a move that signals that the recipient has been informed, but there is more than one way in which recipients can do being informed.

One family of practices that accomplishes this is news receipts (Heritage Reference Heritage, Atkinson and Heritage1984; Maynard Reference Maynard2003; Couper-Kuhlen Reference Couper-Kuhlen and de Ruiter2012). The simplest, least agentive practice recipients have for receipting information is what Heritage (Reference Heritage, Atkinson and Heritage1984) calls a change-of-state token (see also Local Reference Local, Couper-Kuhlen and Selting1996; Golato Reference Golato2010; Koivisto Reference Koivisto2015a; Persson Reference Persson2015; Hilmisdóttir Reference Hilmisdóttir2016; Kasterpalu & Hennoste Reference Kasterpalu and Hennoste2016; Weidner Reference Weidner2016; Heinemann Reference Heinemann2017). With interjections like oh, speakers claim that they now know, after which the sequence reaches possible completion (Heritage Reference Heritage, Atkinson and Heritage1984; Schegloff Reference Schegloff2007). A slightly more expanded sequence arises when recipients use minimal clausal responses, which consist of a pronoun and a copula or auxiliary such as you are or did you (Thompson et al. Reference Thompson, Fox; and Couper-Kuhlen2015:90ff) to request reconfirmation. They thereby treat the information as news, without encouraging further talk on the topic (Schegloff Reference Schegloff, Atkinson and Heritage1984; Maynard Reference Maynard2003; Couper-Kuhlen Reference Couper-Kuhlen and de Ruiter2012).

In contrast with these relatively minimal forms of uptake, recipients have practices to encourage further talk on the news. Many of these practices fall into the family of newsmarks (Jefferson Reference Jefferson1981; Heritage Reference Heritage, Atkinson and Heritage1984; Maynard Reference Maynard2003; Robinson Reference Robinson2009; Couper-Kuhlen Reference Couper-Kuhlen and de Ruiter2012). These newsmarks often come in the form of a lexical or phrasal response with rising intonation such as really. Speakers use them to suggest that the veracity of the news is not a foregone conclusion, and often to solicit some form of an account (Thompson et al. Reference Thompson, Fox; and Couper-Kuhlen2015).

Even more agentive forms of uptake are expanded clausal responses, such as clausal repetitions (Thompson et al. Reference Thompson, Fox; and Couper-Kuhlen2015). These can be used to treat the informing turn as counter to expectations or as counterinformings: the recipient claims to have had prior beliefs on the issue addressed by the speaker (Heritage Reference Heritage, Atkinson and Heritage1984; Robinson Reference Robinson2009; Persson Reference Persson2015). These practices are strongly expansion-implicative and solicit some form of an account for the discrepancy.

This article is concerned with the fourth and most agentive type of response, what Thompson and colleagues (Reference Thompson, Fox; and Couper-Kuhlen2015) call unrelated clausal responses. With these responses recipients do not deal with the information as put by the speaker, but retrieve information that was embedded or presupposed in prior talk: either the immediately prior informing turn or a larger discourse unit in which that turn is contained. By formulating an inference or understandingFootnote ¹ of that turn and making relevant confirmation, recipients treat something as news which was not done as news (see also Terasaki Reference Terasaki and Lerner1976; Smith Reference Smith2013; Steensig & Heinemann Reference Steensig, Heinemann, Reed and Raymond2013).

We argue in this article that when recipients in Dutch talk-in-interaction produce an oh-prefacedFootnote ² unrelated clausal response with yes/no-type interrogative word order, they implement what we gloss as a counterexpectation remark. This term should not be understood as a category of action, on par with such actions as requests or invitations, but as a specific combination of practices used for a specific interactional purpose, comparable to the action of confirming allusions (Schegloff Reference Schegloff1996; see also Enfield Reference Enfield2013; Sidnell & Enfield Reference Sidnell, Enfield, Enfield, Kockelman and Sidnell2014).

By doing a counterexpectation remark, a recipient (i) accepts the terms of the prior, informing turn—the action it implements and the information it conveys; (ii) treats that turn as not in line with a prior, private belief or expectation—one not made public in the interaction; (iii) topicalizes the unexpected inference; (iv) requests confirmation of that inference as well as what Robinson (Reference Robinson2009) calls reconciliatory information; and (v) tentatively accepts the formulated inference or understanding.

Counterexpectation remarks, at least as we define them for this article, thus come in a specific sequential position: after an informing turn. They are therefore produced in environments similar to other types of news uptake, such as free-standing oh. But as they constitute a more agentive form of uptake, they do not merely receipt information, completing a question-answer-oh sequence (Heritage Reference Heritage, Atkinson and Heritage1984; Schegloff Reference Schegloff2007), but also launch a new adjacency pair.

We want to stress here that our claims are not about the speaker's actual, private beliefs; we have no access to the speaker's cognition and as such do not aim to discuss his or her cognitive state. But participants display beliefs through talk, and thus also make claims about what their prior beliefs were through talk, irrespective of whether these claims are true.

To support our argument, the analysis in this paper consists of three steps. We begin by demonstrating that oh-prefaced unrelated clausal responses with yes/no-type interrogative word order (YNIs) (Raymond Reference Raymond2003) implement counterexpectation remarks. We first discuss the clearest cases: counterexpectation remarks that are implemented with oh-prefaced negative YNIs. As Koshik (Reference Koshik2002, Reference Koshik2005; see also Reese Reference Reese2007) has shown, negative YNIs can be used in environments where prior beliefs of the recipient have been called into question. They are used to imply that the formulated belief or understanding is counter to expectations. While this makes them particularly suitable for implementing counterexpectation remarks, we subsequently show that positive YNIs can also implement counterexpectation remarks. That is not to say that positive and negative YNIs are equivalent practices, but both can be used to treat a prior informing turn as counter to expectation.

In closing we show that when unrelated clausal responses with yes/no-type interrogative word order are not oh-prefaced, they implement different actions. By not using oh, the recipient does not accept the terms of speaker's informing turn—either the information it provides or the action it implements—nor the inference formulated in the YNI. In fact, any change-of-state token is only produced after the speaker has provided confirmation and, where relevant, an account (see Heritage Reference Heritage, Atkinson and Heritage1984). These non-oh-prefaced YNIs are thus used to convey that the recipient has a problem understanding or accepting the speaker's prior turn.

DATA AND METHOD

The data we use in this article consist of twenty hours of audio recordings of Dutch informal phone and Skype conversations between friends and family, which were recorded by students at Utrecht University in 2011 and 2012. All speakers signed informed consent forms allowing use of the data for research and publication purposes, and the transcripts have been anonymized: all proper names are pseudonyms, except in a few cases where the original name does not help in identifying the participant and was necessary for analytical purposes—for example, we did not change the names of sports teams.

From these data we initially selected all oh-prefaced YNIs (n = 38). We subsequently removed the cases where the YNI (i) did not respond to an informing turn,Footnote ³ or (ii) implemented topicalization in response to a news announcement (was het leuk ‘was it fun’) (Button & Casey Reference Button and Casey1985). This resulted in a collection of twenty-seven counterexpectation remarks.

In order to compare these counterexpectation remarks with other YNIs we also collected the first 300 YNIs from the corpus and then selected all YNIs that were used to convey that the prior, informing turn was not in line with the speaker's prior beliefs or expectations. This led to a total of twenty-six cases of non-oh-prefaced YNIs for comparison.

The data have been analyzed using conversation analysis (Ten Have Reference Ten Have2007) and transcribed according to Jeffersonian conventions (Jefferson Reference Jefferson and Lerner2004; see the appendix for an overview). The transcripts consist of three lines: first the original Dutch, then a word-by-word translation into English, and finally a free translation.

COUNTEREXPECTATION REMARKS

RESPONDING WITH POSITIVE INTERROGATIVES

So far we have focused exclusively on negative interrogatives, but positive interrogatives can be used in a similar, albeit not completely identical, manner. We demonstrate this on the basis of two examples.Footnote ⁵ In the first case, excerpt (5) below, the recipient initially produces a positive YNI but after a short pause produces a negative YNI, changing the preferred response from yes to no. Tina has been telling Anna, her daughter, what she had for dinner and that it tasted very good, which Anna positively assesses in line 1. Tina then in line 2 shows that she is now going to ask about Anna, and subsequently, after 0.3 seconds of silence, displays her expectation that Anna still has to eat.

1. (5)

   

Anna's response in line 6 shows that neither confirmation nor disconfirmation are appropriate responses. She has already eaten something, a bag of carrots, but also still has some cooking to do, baking a tartare. Instead of simply receipting or assessing Anna's answer, Tina provides a positive oh-prefaced YNI, inquiring whether Anna is alone. After a 0.8 second gap and in overlap with Anna's confirmation, she uses a negative YNI to inquire whether Nicole, Anna's roommate, is not with her. Anna subsequently explains that Nicole has to make arrangements for the anniversary of Veri, her student society (similar to a fraternity/sorority), which Tina receipts with oh ja in line 21.

Like the oh-prefaced negative YNIs discussed in the prior section, Tina's turn in line 14 consists of three practices. First, while Anna has been talking about what she is having for dinner, Tina responds by asking whether she is alone. She thus implements an unrelated clausal response, shifting the focus of the at-issue talk. Second, her turn is oh-prefaced, treating her inference that Anna is alone as just now arrived at, thereby accepting Anna's answer about her dinner. Third, by using the YNI she takes a relatively unknowing stance with regard to the inference. This does not mean the issue of whether or not Anna is alone is considered in doubt: by oh-prefacing Tina tentatively accepts this inference and as is indeed clear from her subsequent negative YNI, she no longer holds the belief that Anna is alone. Instead by using a YNI and not uttering a declarative, she treats the inference as unexpected. But unlike that subsequent negative YNI, her positive YNI does not explicitly register an abandoned expectation.

The positive YNI as it is used here is in a sense a weaker version of the negative YNI. With an oh-prefaced negative YNI the speaker implies that he or she had a prior belief that directly contradicts the prior talk, but with a positive YNI the speaker merely treats the formulated inference as unexpected. Having abandoned a prior belief, as in (5), is only one of the reasons why something may be unexpected.

The following case makes that emphatically clear. Bea has called Moniek, her daughter, simply to chat. After a reciprocal greeting sequence, Bea asks Moniek in line 1 how she is doing.

1. (6)

   

In response to Moniek's positive assessment in line 3, Bea produces an oh with a strong rising intonation, possibly to convey that some elaboration is desired, and asks what Moniek is doing. Moniek answers in line 7 that she is eating with Marjanne, a friend of hers whom Bea also knows. After a long lapse of 1.0 second, Bea produces an oh-prefaced YNI in line 9, formulating her understanding that Marjanne is at Moniek's.Footnote ⁶ This is disconfirmed by Moniek as she is at Marjanne's. Bea then uses an oh-prefaced repeat in line 13 to formulate her now-revised understanding (Koivisto Reference Koivisto2015b; Persson Reference Persson2015; Robinson Reference Robinson2009; Seuren et al. Reference Seuren, Huiskes and Koole2016) and follows with an assessment. Moniek agrees with this assessment and then moves to a new topic in lines 15–16.

Our focus is on the turn in line 9. By disconfirming and correcting, Moniek addresses it as a fairly straightforward request for information. We want to argue, however, that with it Bea treats it as here-and-now relevant that she did not know that Moniek was with Marjanne. That is, she does not ask a follow-up question, but implements a counterexpectation remark. To start, we show that it consists of the same three practices as excerpt (5).

First, Bea shifts the focus of the talk from Moniek's answer of sharing dinner with Marjanne to Marjanne visiting Moniek, thereby providing an unrelated clausal response. Second, by oh-prefacing Bea tentatively accepts the inference that Marjanne is visiting Moniek, something Bea thus previously did not know, thereby also accepting that Moniek is having dinner with Marjanne. Third, Bea uses a YNI, thereby taking a relatively unknowing stance and projecting not just confirmation but, at least in this sequential environment, also some form of elaboration.

Using a positive YNI does not, therefore, suggest an abandoned expectation: there is no evidence that Bea had any expectations about Marjanne. But neither does it merely convey an inference, nor, as with (5), does it treat the matter as still in question. Speakers can extract news, that is, foreground something as news that was not conveyed as news both with declarative or polar interrogative word order (Steensig & Heinemann Reference Steensig, Heinemann, Reed and Raymond2013; Thompson et al. Reference Thompson, Fox; and Couper-Kuhlen2015). By using an oh-prefaced YNI, Bea does not treat the news as something she just now learned (cf. Seuren et al. Reference Seuren, Huiskes and Koole2016), but as in some way not in line with her prior beliefs, that is, as unexpected. And indeed, by conveying the inference at all, by extracting news that was not conveyed as news, she treats it as relevant that she did not expect it.

The reason why Bea considers Moniek being at Marjanne's house relevant then and there does not become clear immediately: both participants treat Bea's turn as requesting confirmation. And after having resolved who is visiting whom, Moniek simply launches a new activity, thanking Bea on Marjanne's behalf. It thus initially seems that it is merely treated as unexpected news.

But if we look at how the conversation progresses in (7) below, we see that this activity is closed quickly: the talk between excerpts (6) and (7) comprises a mere nine seconds in which Bea acknowledges Marjanne's gratitude. Immediately afterwards Bea says that they will keep the conversation short (line 35). Moreover, with the resumption marker maar ‘but’ (Mazeland & Huiskes Reference Mazeland, Huiskes, Selting and Couper-Kuhlen2001) and the inferential dan ‘then’ Bea designs this proposal as based on earlier talk: Bea conveys that they should keep the conversation short, because Moniek is with Marjanne. She thus changes the activity from a somewhat standard conversational opening “how are you” sequence and establishing a first topic (Schegloff Reference Schegloff1968), to the topic of Moniek being with Marjanne, as it means they can talk only briefly.

1. (7)

   

Bea thus treats the inference as unexpected and as relevant, because it means Marjanne is not available for talk. The assumption that a call-taker is available for talk is inherently conveyed by the act of calling (see Schegloff Reference Schegloff1968), or at least by moving into the conversation without verifying whether the recipient is indeed available for talk. By calling, Bea has interrupted a social encounter, and not just any social encounter: a dinner between friends. By proposing to keep the conversation brief and relating that proposal to her inference that Moniek is having dinner with Marjanne, she implies that had she known that Moniek was having dinner with Marjanna, she would not have called.

While it may seem that Bea is proposing to keep the conversation short of her own accord, on deeper inspection it looks like Moniek has been dropping subtle hints that Bea is calling at a bad time. First, she does not answer Bea's ‘how are you’ in the conventional way with a simple adjective, but instead gives a clausal response. Second, she does not reciprocate the question, resulting in a lapse of 0.9 seconds. Third, she answers Bea's inquiry in line 5 in the most minimal way, stating only what she is doing. She does not take it up as a topic proffer (Schegloff Reference Schegloff2007), and the result is again a lapse, this time of 1.0 second. Finally, she does not treat Bea's turn in line 13 as an invitation or an opportunity to say more about what she is currently doing with Marjanne.

If these points do show that Moniek treats her mother's call as ill-timed, they are subtle clues, and they also do not work very well. While both agree to keep the conversation short, they actually talk for another minute and a half, in which Bea unsuccessfully solicits news from Moniek (data not shown). When Moniek says that she wants to get back to being gezellig ‘fun’/’sociable’ Bea instead passes the phone to Moniek's father. Only when Moniek starts pressing for an end to the conversation by saying that it is not gezellig if she is on the phone the whole time do they move to conversational closure.

To sum up, we have shown in this section that oh-prefaced positive YNIs are used in a manner similar to oh-prefaced negative YNIs: when produced in response to an informing turn, they are used to convey an inference from the interlocutor's prior turn, and to treat that inference as unexpected. Both also make relevant confirmation as a next action.

But there are differences. While negative YNIs treat the inference as here-and-now relevant and unexpected, because it is polar opposite to a prior belief by the speaker, positive YNIs do not convey a now-abandoned expectation. They merely imply that the inference is somehow not in line with the speaker's prior beliefs. The here-and-now relevance of the inference is therefore not made clear through the counterexpectation remark itself.

Additionally, as there are no discrepant states of affairs, it is not clear whether positive YNIs also request reconciliatory information. Extracts (5) and (6) do not provide evidence that they do, but we do find it in other cases (see for example Seuren et al. Reference Seuren, Huiskes and Koole2016:ex. 6). The limited size of our collection makes it hard to answer this question definitively.

What does become clear is that the action implications of negative and positive YNIs are not that dissimilar, at least not in Dutch talk-in-interaction. Much depends on the sequential position of the turn in which the YNI is produced. We showed that when either is oh-prefaced and used to address turns that are done to inform, they implement counterexpectation remarks.

CHALLENGES AND REPAIR

In the previous sections we argued that by combining three practices—(i) an unrelated clausal response, (ii) oh-prefacing, and (iii) yes/no-type interrogative word order—speakers implement what we gloss as a counterexpectation remark. In this section we show three cases similar to counterexpectation remarks. All consist of an unrelated clausal response with yes/no-type interrogative word order, but in each case the recipient does not preface his or her turn with oh. Like knowledge-discrepancy questions, these non-oh-prefaced YNIs are used by recipients to address a discrepancy between the speaker's prior informing turn, and the recipient's prior knowledge or beliefs (Steensig & Heinemann Reference Steensig, Heinemann, Reed and Raymond2013). In these cases, however, the recipient does not necessarily request confirmation and elaboration. While these actions can receive confirmation and an account, the speaker can also provide only confirmation or even back down, treating the response not as an inquiry, but a challenge (see Heinemann Reference Heinemann2008). Without the oh-preface the recipient does not accept the terms of the prior informing turn—either the action it implements or the information it conveys—and thus implements a different action.

Consider excerpt (8). Sarah and Jessica are talking about a mutual friend who is in her final year of high school. In the Netherlands, high schools have a centralized national exam, which their mutual friend has to take. Sarah says in line 2 that the exams are soon, and Jessica initially accepts with her claim of remembering; oh ja da's waar ‘oh yeah that's right’ (Heritage Reference Heritage, Atkinson and Heritage1984; Seuren et al. Reference Seuren, Huiskes and Koole2016).

1. (8)

   

While Jessica initially accepts Sarah's informing turn that the exams are soon, even claiming that she also knew it, she uses a negative interrogative in line 5 to introduce her expectation that the exams have in fact already started. As she uses a negative interrogative, confirmation would be in line with Sarah's statement that the exams are to start soon. That is, a confirming response would mean that the exams have not started this week. But Sarah does not provide confirmation. In fact, both participants in the subsequent talk orient to the YNI as a challenge, as a reversed polarity question where disconfirmation is the preferred response (Koshik Reference Koshik2005): (i) Sarah backs down from her earlier statement, now saying that it could be that the exams have already started (line 7) and (ii) Jessica states that she actually believes that the exams have already started (line 8).

Jessica's YNI seems to hold the middle ground between a counterinforming and a counterexpectation remark. She does not say Sarah is wrong and that the exams have already started, but neither does she treat the formulated state of affairs as an inference she has now arrived at. She thus creates room for Sarah to either confirm, whereby Sarah would claim epistemic primacy, or to back down. The difference between Jessica's YNI and the cases in Responding with positive interrogatives above is brought about by the lack of oh: as Jessica's turn in line 5 is not oh-prefaced she does not convey tentative acceptance of either the formulated inference or the terms of the turn it addresses.

The following excerpt is also a case in which the negative YNI indexes resistance to the terms of a prior informing turn. In this case the speaker treats the prior turn as confusing, that is, the speaker claims a lack of understanding and shows why she does not understand. The excerpt is from a conversation between two friends, Rianna and Melinda. Rianna has been telling Melinda about her recent visit to a university in Belgium where she might want to get a master's degree.

1. (9)

   

In line 1 Rianna is finishing a complaint. She had gone to Belgium to get information about three specific programs, but the university did not provide information on those programs. An affiliating response might be something like co-complaining or expressing sympathy, but instead Melinda claims she does not understand with huh and then uses a YNI to address the issue of whether Rianna could have known in advance. She uses a TCU-initial maar, not as a resumption marker, but to show that there is a contrast between what Rianna just said and her uptake. In other words, she can be seen to question whether Rianna has a right to complain: should she not simply have prepared better? Melinda also responds to it as a complaint: she provides confirmation and explains that indeed she could not have known in advance, shifting the blame to the university.

Melinda's YNI shares some features with the counterexpectation remarks: she addresses a discrepancy between Rianna's prior informing turn and what might be expected. Rianna also subsequently confirms and elaborates. But as Melinda's turn is not oh-prefaced, it does not convey an inference Melinda has now arrived at. Instead, using huh she claims that she does not understand the prior turn and in her YNI she formulates the problem.

Finally, consider (10). This excerpt is also from a conversation between two friends, Christy and Marsha, who are talking about a recent soccer match, the final of the annual cup in which FC Twente beat Ajax 3–2 despite being down 0–2 at half-time.

1. (10)

   

In line 1 Marsha tells Christy that Tom, her boyfriend, stopped watching when Ajax was ahead and that he wanted her to call out to him only if the game was again level. What follows is a silence of 0.8 seconds, after which Christy produces a YNI, formulating her inference that Tom supports Twente. Christy's turn has almost all of the telltale signs of a counterexpectation remark: (i) it is an unrelated clausal response, (ii) it has yes/no-type interrogative word order, and (iii) it formulates an inference that is not in line with her prior beliefs, a contrast that is even marked with turn-initial maar. But she only produces an oh after Marsha has provided confirmation, that is, she does not accept the revised understanding until after the confirmation.

Notice that after Marsha's confirming response, Christy explicitly formulates that she did not know (line 7) and that she thought that Tom supported Ajax (line 9). Although this prior belief is introduced with Ik dacht ‘I thought’, it is a different practice from the ‘I thought’-initiated turns discussed by Smith (Reference Smith2013). In the cases discussed by Smith, the ‘I thought’-turns are produced in response to a problematic informing turn in order to reveal a discrepancy and solicit an account for that discrepancy. Here Christy uses it after the discrepancy has already been resolved, and it gets only reconfirmation. She uses it to account for the delay in progressivity. It is a practice that is frequently produced to account for a problem after repair has been initiated and resolved (Schegloff Reference Schegloff1992; Ekberg Reference Ekberg2012; see also Seuren et al. Reference Seuren, Huiskes and Koole2016:ex. 5).

These three cases show that while unrelated clausal responses to informing turns implemented with YNIs treat that prior turn as counter to the speaker's beliefs or expectations, they do not implement counterexpectation remarks. Instead, they treat that prior turn as somehow problematic in light of the recipient's prior beliefs. Oh-prefacing is thus a crucial aspect of counterexpectation remarks: it indexes that the speaker has tentatively accepted the formulated understanding and by extension the terms of the prior informing turn, both the information it conveys and the action it implements.