eben can be used in Standard German as adjective (meaning ‘flat’), as time adverb (‘just’), as intensifier, as answer particle, or modal particle (Felder 2017). As answer or modal particle, it can also be relevant for evidentiality, as it can express that a proposition is common knowledge or that it can be inferred from what has already been said (Brausse 1986, Karagjosova 2003). In these cases, eben links an utterance to its context on the level of evidentiality.

In our talk, we focus on interactional uses of eben relevant to the negotiation of evidentiality. We suggest a way to combine context-sensitive quantitative analysis with qualitative analysis on the microlevel of conversations within the context of oral school tasks. In our corpus of 180 videorecorded discussions (873 minutes in total) of Swiss German elementary school children (aged 7–12), eben occurs 900 times, of which 473 are turn-initial or constitute a single-word turn. We annotated the entirely transcribed corpus with context-sensitive codes for argumentative actions (e.g., oppositional/validating justification or (dis-)agreement in relation to a previous statement, etc.), 38 conversations have been annotated additionally with regard to different devices used for positionings or justifications.

Analyzing our data, we draw on the GLOBE-framework (“globality and locality in the organization of jointly constructed units“, Quasthoff/Heller/Morek 2017) for describing oral argumentation competence (Heller 2012). In this understanding, eben can be seen as a ‘linguistic form’ within different ‘pragmatic devices’ (like ‘giving a statement’ or ‘supporting the own positioning with a justification’, etc.) to process interactional jobs like ‘positioning’ or ‘justifying’. At the same time, eben can be related to negotiations of epistemicity, as it is often used at the beginning of turns to upgrade one’s epistemic authority by supporting a claim or making a conclusion explicit while affiliating with the previous speaker; a dual function of agreeing with the previous turn and at the same time pointing to an already displayed or postpositioned position (cf. Betz/Deppermann 2018).

In our talk, we will ask which correlations of turn-initial eben with our codings can be observed, how these observations can be related to different interactional uses of eben, and how their sequential embedding relates to that of the information they are intended to update.

Evidentiality refers to the grammatical, lexical, textual resources (for Italian, e.g. Pietrandrea 2007, Rocci 2012, Miecznikowski 2016) whereby the speaker categorizes his/her sources of knowledge for a proposition P in assertive utterances and, from an interactional perspective, manages his/her epistemic positioning in various sequential contexts (recently, Cornillie/Gras 2020).

In this paper, we take a step further towards an interactional account of evidentiality. Following recent proposals on the temporality of grammar (Mushin/Pekarek-Doehler 2021) and on categorization as an incremental and collaborative activity (Mauri et al. 2021), our goal is to investigate how the production of evidential resources in spoken discourse unfolds in time to achieve source categorization.

We use conversational data from the TIGR corpus (6h) and the Kiparla corpus (16h) of spoken Italian, and combine systematic annotation of evidential resources with sequential analysis of selected phenomena.

In this contribution, adopting the methods of Interactional Linguistics and Conversation Analysis, we scrutinize a subset of evidential resources (around 30% of the total dataset) which are produced within increments or self-repairs. These practices allow the speaker to modulate the degree of explicitness and specificity of P’s sources and to negotiate epistemic positioning, targeting and preventing possible troubles in the epistemic affiliation with the interlocutor.

Our findings overall suggest that the production of evidential resources is finely tuned to the sequential and epistemic organization of talk and interplays with practices in the incremental construction of the turn and the sequence.

Example

BO046: ma, maurizio quando parte?
when is maurizio leaving?
BO021: il venticinque[P].
on the twenty-fifth.
BO046: ah,
oh,
BO021: dovrebbe[E], se ho ben capito[E], perche' dovrebbe avere tipo un esame il ventotto o una cosa del genere[E]
he should, if I understood well, because he should have like an exam on the twenty-eighth or something
BO046: e giada resta?
and is Giada staying here?
BO021: penso[E] di si’[P]. (-) cioe' io da come l'ho capita[E], si’[P].
I think so. (-) I mean, as far as I understood, yes.

References

Mauri, C., Fiorentini, I. Goria, E. (2021). Building Categories in Interaction. Linguistic resources at work. John Benjamins.

Miecznikowski, J. (2016). An experience that apparently differs a lot from mine”. Evidentials in discourse: the case of gastronomic discussions. In S. Greco/M. Danesi (Eds.), Case studies in Discourse Analysis. Lincom Europa, 270-298.

Mushin I., Pekarek-Doehler S., (2021), Linguistic structures in social interaction: Moving temporality to the forefront of a science of language, Interactional Linguistics, 101(1), 2–32.

Rocci, A. (2012). Modality and argumentative discourse relations: A study of the Italian necessity modal dovere. Journal of Pragmatics 44(15), 2129-2149.

Pietrandrea, P. (2007). The grammatical nature of some epistemic-evidential adverbs in spoken Italian. Italian Journal of Linguistics 19, 39-64

Squartini, M. (2008). Lexical vs. grammatical evidentiality in French and Italian, 46(5), 917-947.