Abstract
Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in lowland Peru, this study examines linguistic resources used for coding agreements in Alto Perené (Arawak) conversation. The study draws on the anthropological tradition of conversation analysis-informed ethnographies. The investigation of agreeing responses is limited to those which allow a projectedly ‘knowing’, or K-plus, participant to raise his or her epistemic status from the sequentially second position. It is shown that Alto Perené K-plus response formats include the evaluative property word kametsari ‘good’ with an intensifier and/or upgraded prosody, argument focus structures, two polarity verbs ari ‘it is the case’ and omapero ‘it is true’, and the verb ñakiro ‘as you can see’. This analysis demonstrates a relationship between the Alto Perené practices of expressing K-plus agreements and the collateral effects arising from the particular meanings and functions of structures which are used for accomplishing an agreeing action.
Preliminaries
Theoretical background and research goals
The study of epistemic positioning of interactants in conversation is a vibrant line of academic research carried out across Western languages (see e.g. Hayano, 2011; Heritage, 2011, 2013a, 2013b; Iwasaki and Yap, 2015; Kamio, 1994, 1997; Morita, 2005; Sidnell, 2009a, 2012; Stivers et al., 2011, to name a few). The scholarly interest in this subject is motivated by the critical contribution of the ‘epistemic engine’ (Heritage, 2012a) into talk production and coordination.
One of the profound insights of contemporary conversation analysis (CA) concerns the essentially universal principle of the interactants’ epistemic positioning in conversation across language groups (Heritage, 1984, 2002, 2008, 2012a, 2013a, 2013b). In particular, speakers occupy different positions on the epistemic gradient, from ‘knowing’ or K-plus (‘K+’) position to ‘unknowing’ or K-minus (‘K−’) position (Heritage, 2013b: 377–378). Following Heritage (2013b: 377), I will use the terms ‘K-plus’ and ‘K-minus’ to refer to a claim of relative epistemic advantage.
The participant’s epistemic position is formally expressed in their stance, with the stance being intimately linked to their epistemic status. The concepts of epistemic status and epistemic stance are characterized by a set of features, summarized in Table 1.
Key concepts (Heritage, 2008: 309, 2012a: 33, 2013a: 558, 2013b: 376–378).
Assessment sequences present a pertinent illustration of how participants negotiate their epistemic claims. Assessment is understood here in a sense of Pomerantz (1984), Goodwin and Goodwin (1992), and Sidnell and Enfield (2012). In particular, it is defined as ‘the use of an evaluative expression … to express a person’s stance toward someone or something, often in the grammatical form of an assertion’ (Sidnell and Enfield, 2012: 312). Speakers of English and other languages associate the first position slot in a sequence with indexing greater epistemic authority and rights (Heritage, 2012b: 322). Assessments in first positions are especially implicative in claiming epistemic primacy. When a K-minus speaker goes first in an assessment sequence, a K-plus second speaker could deploy a variety of resources to redress the epistemic incongruity to raise his epistemic claim. Epistemic incongruity refers to the situation when conversationalists ‘disagree over who has greater authority and/or more rights’ (Stivers et al., 2011: 16). As Heritage and Raymond (2005) observe, ‘because assessments are produced in real time and are unavoidably produced as first and second positioned actions, they bring unavoidable relevance to the issues concerning relative epistemic rights to evaluate states of affairs’ (p. 16). Heritage and Raymond (2005) contend that first position assessments
carry an implied claim that the speaker has primary rights to evaluate the matter assessed. For example, […] persons offering first assessments may work to defeat any implications that they are claiming primary rights to evaluate the matter at hand. Conversely, persons who find themselves producing a responsive assessment may wish to defeat the implication that their rights in the matter are secondary to those of a first speaker. (p. 16)
In other words, when a K-plus speaker goes second, he or she may challenge the ‘unknowing’ status projected for her by lowering the epistemic claims of the first speaker via particular morphosyntactic means. Since first assessments invite agreements, second position assessments are typically cast as agreeing responses (Pomerantz, 1978, 1984). A certain type of agreement is known as a ‘K-plus agreement’. This term is used throughout the article to refer to a situation when a K-plus participant counteracts a claim of epistemic primacy from the second position slot in an assessment sequence.
Previous comparative studies have shown that the linguistic resources of a given language, in Sidnell’s (2009a: 4) words, ‘essentially define the possibilities for social action accomplished through talk’. Comparative studies have revealed a striking variety of local language-specific means exploited in K-plus agreements by native speakers of English (Heritage, 1984, 2002), Mandarin Chinese (Wu, 2004), Japanese (Hayano, 2013; Hayashi, 2003), and Finnish (Sorjonen, 2002; Sorjonen and Hakulinen, 2009). However, the insights of the previous work are based on research carried out in a few Western languages by the native speakers of these languages. An exploration of the ways in which the producers of second assessments (who have primary epistemic rights) assert these rights has been conducted so far in a handful of less-studied languages. Among the most recent works, two studies are of particular interest: of English Guyana Creole by Sidnell (2009b) and of English Guyana Creole, Finnish, and Lao by Sidnell and Enfield (2012). The significant outcome of the study by Sidnell and Enfield (2012) is its prediction that across language/culture groups, the practices of doing K-plus agreements will have a ‘collateral effect’ due to the divergent grammars of the languages. Sidnell and Enfield (2012: 313) assert the following:
By selecting a certain lexicosyntactic vehicle as means for achieving social-action ends, speakers unavoidably introduce associated features, thereby introducing collateral effects that we suggest are imported by limitations of lexicosyntactic resources for the construction of social action through primarily linguistic turns at talk.
The scholars claim that speakers of each language under study exploit morphosyntactic affordances to fulfill their interactional needs. In each, a specific linguistic vehicle, chosen for doing K-plus agreements, exhibits a collateral effect. In Creole, the turn accomplishing a K-plus agreement begins with if, treating the prior turn as if it had been a question. In Lao, the factive perfective particle lèq l expresses finality of the agreement turn. In Finnish, it is the word order, VS, which signals that the hearer agrees with the prior statement, but holds a different perspective with the speaker.
This research on what Heritage (2012b) calls the ‘collateralized practice’ (p. 322) of doing K-plus agreements focuses on the overt verbal expression of the hearer’s epistemic stance in Alto Perené second position statements. An investigation of other modalities such as gaze, posture, and body movements is not undertaken here; this work still awaits further study. To achieve the current research objective, I consider the following questions: What morphosyntactic resources are used in upgraded statements for coding epistemic stance? What means are selected for doing K-plus agreements? What are the collateral effects brought off by the practices of K-plus agreements? The article is outlined as follows. The first section, preliminaries, is followed by a summary of the community background. The next section discusses linguistic resources used for expressing epistemic stance in assessments. The discussion section focuses on the Alto Perené collateralized practices of doing K-plus agreements. It is followed by the concluding remarks summarizing the study’s findings.
Data
The video and audio data come from my annual fieldtrips to the Upper Perené valley of Chanchamayo province, from 2009 to 2015, totaling a period of 21 months. The corpus of everyday conversation consists of approximately 20 hours of video and audio recordings. Less than four hours of audio recordings overlap with the video data. The total number of recordings is 112. The recordings were made either inside or outside the speakers’ home residences in 11 villages. Most talks focus on certain topics, for example language decline, a healing technique, or preparation of food; others discuss village news and interpersonal issues. Recorded talk includes two to five parties. Complete transcripts of the recorded everyday talk, made in the native language with the accompanying Spanish or English translations, are available for approximately six hours of conversational data. The recordings and the transcripts were produced by three primary language consultants and the author. The accuracy of the transcripts was verified at least once by another consultant. In many cases, more than one consultant was asked to check the transcribed material. The coding of the data used in this research was done by the author.
In addition, there are over seven hours of video-recorded public meetings, two of which took place in Bajo Marankiari and one in Villa Perené. Less than two hours of recorded data are transcribed. Overall, the number of co-participants in the recorded talk is over 40. Over two hours of recorded conversations and meetings are available to the public on the YouTube channel with the ID ‘katonkosatzi1’.
Methods
For the analysis of data, this presentation draws on the anthropological tradition of CA-informed ethnographies. This interdisciplinary approach relies on the combination of long-term ethnographic observation of the communicative practices of a native speech community, documentary video and audio recordings of the community’s ways of living and speaking, and transcription of the recorded conversation data. The method was pioneered by Michael Moerman (1977, 1988, 1993) in his analysis of conversational Thai data. Among the practitioners of this methodological approach are Charles Goodwin (1980), Marjorie Goodwin (1990), Charles Goodwin and Marjorie Goodwin (1987, 1992), Sidnell (2001, 2005, 2007, 2008) and linguists affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (Dingemanse, 2015; Dingemanse and Enfield, 2015; Dingemanse and Floyd, 2014; Dingemanse et al., 2014; Enfield, 2013). This eclectic approach to the analysis of Alto Perené conversational data gives this presentation an advantage of situating the microanalysis of the turns at talk of a less-studied language in the rich cultural context of native speakers’ ways of living.
A restricted sample for this study was selected in a systematic way. Upon the examination of the available data, 10 dyads were found to produce 165 assessment sequences. The focus of this study is placed on those cases in which responses are produced as assertions expressing agreement with the prior speaker’s evaluation of the referent situation. Special import is given to the analysis of responses which explicitly mark the hearer’s epistemic stance.
Community background
This section outlines the linguistic and socio-cultural aspects of the Alto Perené community which are deemed relevant to the analysis of the speakers’ epistemic positioning in talk. The ethnic population is estimated to be 5500; the number of speakers is much smaller, about 1000 people. The majority of Alto Perené households participate in the market economy, either as producers of cash crops (with coffee, cacao, plantains, and pineapples being the staple crops) or hired hands. The Alto Perené live in a small-scale egalitarian society, with a diffuse institutional structure. They are organized into 40 native communities (Figure 1), registered as legal entities with titles to their territories, and governed by tribal chiefs.
Alto Perené settlements (by Adella Edwards).
The language is highly synthetic, agglutinating, and predominantly suffixing. Many verbs and nouns constitute linear strings of segmentable affixes, typically assigned to particular slots. The verb plays a key role in Alto Perené grammar (see Mihas, 2015 for details). In talk, turns are often expressed by verbs in clausal function. Verbs have a striking proclivity for coding a variety of information about the participants, the internal structure of an action, its manner, timing, spatial proximity, intensity, and so on. The verb carries information about the source of the speaker’s knowledge, whether it is visual, auditory, ‘the gut feeling’, hearsay, inference, or shared general knowledge. To this end, the perception verbs ñ ‘see’ and kim ‘hear’, parenthetical verbs ikantzi ‘they say’, or ‘he says’, nokantzi ‘I say’, and a variety of modal formatives are used to report on the source of information (Mihas, 2014a). The grammar also marks on the verb the speaker’s discovery of new knowledge. This category is expressed by the suffix -atai ‘new discovery’.
In declaring knowledge, speakers are concerned about the reliability of its source. Depending on the source of the speaker’s knowledge, the degree of their epistemic commitment to a given proposition presents a continuum, varying from strong to weak. In line with Alto Perené socio-cultural organization, which favors personal freedom and has a diffuse institutional structure, personal experience (Table 2) is the most reliable source of information.
Types of personal experience and epistemic stance.
The speakers could be said to be ‘wedded to epistemic individualism’, in terms of Hardwig (1985: 343), since they first and foremost cherish their own epistemic authority. Statements which rely on personal sensory experience express the strongest epistemic commitment, with the visual experience being the most authoritative and reliable. 1 When a declarative statement does not explicitly specify the information source, it is interpreted to be grounded in the speaker’s personal experience by default. Shared knowledge, which constitutes co-participants’ common ground, is ranked highly as well. Shared collective experience of all parties including the speaker is rated as second best after the speaker’s own experience, in terms of reliability. In contrast, shared personal experience of other parties is less valued among the Alto Perené. Speakers’ epistemic positioning in talk is directly linked to their concern of being truthful.
In social interaction, direct and explicit claims to truth are expected. Being truthful is understood as being sincere, that is, having belief in the veracity of the stated proposition. Deception is seen as an aggression against an interlocutor. Mendacity and a lack of reserve in social behavior are commonly believed to be a sorcerer’s defining characteristic. Lying and public displays of negative affectivity (anger, anxiety, worry, or sadness) through verbal and non-verbal behavior may potentially have a high social cost. The sanctioned individuals are typically evicted from the community; in the past, they were executed (see Mihas, 2014b for details).
Language-specific resources in K-plus agreements
Overview
For the purpose of this study of epistemic marking in K-plus agreements, the focus of the section is limited to the expression of epistemic stance in upgraded responses. Upgraded statements are used to assert that the speaker’s epistemic primacy is equal or superior to that of the other participant. The modification is carried out through the use of segmental marking, lexical means, or specific constructions.
As Table 3 illustrates, Alto Perené verbs play a principal role in the formation of linguistic resources dedicated to coding epistemic stance in second position assessments.
Summary of language-specific resources explicitly coding epistemic stance.
As summarized in Table 3, the principal means of upgrading one’s epistemic status are constructions formed with the positive polarity verbs ari ‘it is the case’ and omapero ‘it is true’, as well as the stand-alone tokens of these verbs, and the stand-alone perception verb ñakiro ‘as you can see’ with the semantics of new knowledge. The polarity verb ari ‘it is the case’ and ari-based constructions constitute the bulk of the inventory used for coding epistemic stance in upgraded second assessments. This polarity verb is the main element of the linguistic resources listed in Table 3. Because of the truth-asserting semantics of the verb ari ‘it is the case’, the deployment of its forms and constructions in turns at talk makes it a common means of indexing the participant’s epistemic stance. Two other linguistic expressions, the verbs omapero ‘it is true’ and ñakiro ‘as you can see’, also explicitly code the speaker’s epistemic position.
The functions of the linguistic resources listed in Table 3 vary, depending on their sequential position. In first positions, the forms ari ‘it is the case’ and arive ‘it is very much the case’ (2 and 3) downgrade the speaker’s epistemic status. The tokens aritya ‘gosh, it is the case’ and arikia ‘it is the case indeed’ (4 and 5) have not been found to occur in first positions. In second positions, the constructions and stand-alone forms in 1–5 (Table 3) either confirm the prior assessment (ari ‘it is the case’ + declarative clause, ari ‘it is the case’, arive ‘it is very much the case’, aritya ‘gosh, it is the case’, and arikia ‘it is the case indeed’) or function as a vehicle for assertions (ñakiro ‘as you can see’) in 8. The stand-alone verb ñakiro ‘as you can see’ in 8 raises the speaker’s epistemic access in any sequential environment. The stand-alone verb omapero ‘it is true’ in 7 can accomplish either of the two functions in second position, namely confirmation or request for clarification, the latter being signaled by the rising intonation.
The next section will elaborate on the actions that each resource listed in Table 3 produces in assessment sequences. The affordances of the linguistic resources used in agreements (confirmations) will be described first, followed by a brief summary of the local resources deployed to accomplish other actions, such as a request for clarification, promise, informing action, and an allusion to the changed epistemic status of the other participant.
Language-specific resources used in K-plus agreements
Construction ari ‘it is the case’ + declarative clause
In assessment sequences, the occurrence of the construction ari ‘it is the case’ + declarative clause is restricted to the second position slot. It is deployed to confirm the accuracy of the prior assessment. It also indexes the hearer’s direct access to knowledge and equal epistemic rights to the relevant state of affairs. The forms ari, aritaki, and aitaki occur in free variation, with the intensifying suffix -taki amplifying the degree of the speaker’s certainty of knowledge.
Extract 1 is cited from a sequence whose participants, two sisters Delia and Victorina, discuss the poor work ethic of some male fellow villagers. The males get hired by a local to do a job, but after getting paid midway into the project, leave the work unfinished and go in search of other jobs. In line 1, Delia asserts that because the hired hands are irresponsible, they move on to a different location. Victorina’s upgraded response contains an acknowledgment/agreement token aja, followed by the stand-alone token of aritaki ‘it is the case’ and the construction aritaki + declarative clause. After Victorina confirms her sister’s evaluation, she makes an allusion to the joint experience of having failed to rein in these males. In particular, she marks the verb vetsik ‘make’, ‘create’, ‘fix’ in line 4 with the first person plural marker a-. This reference to shared experience strengthens her claim to epistemic primacy (see Table 2 for details).
Extract 1. Bajo Marankiari, 2009
2
1 D i-kant-ashi-t-an-ak-a irotaki i-ja-t-ant-aj-ia-ri ‘They (hired hands) are irresponsible, that’s why they will go 2 y-a-an-ak-e pashini tsika i-n-ken-an-ak-e and take a different (job) wherever they go 3 y-ant-[a-vai-t-e] to work’. 4 V→ [aja ‘Aha, it is the case. It is the case that they are this way,
and we do not know how 6 a-vetsik-av-aj-e-ri pashini we could fix them’. 7 D mmj ‘Mm hm’.
Stand-alone tokens of the verb ari ‘it is the case’
Stand-alone tokens of ari ‘it is the case’ and arive ‘it is very much the case’ are commonly used in confirmations. These resources are associated with affiliation, or overt endorsement of the prior speaker’s stance. In second positions, the upgraded agreements often contain the stand-alone forms aritya ‘gosh, it is the case’, arikia ‘it is the case indeed’, and arive ‘it is very much the case’. They index the participant’s direct access to the referent situation. The upgraded statement in line 4, Extract 2 is cited from a conversation recorded outside Livia’s house. Livia complains about the lack of firewood for cooking and her physical inability to bring it from afar. Livia’s turn concludes her granular description of her lonely life, filled with the struggle to survive at old age. Livia’s visitor, a long-term neighbor, also an elderly person, responds with the positive polarity verb aritaki ‘it is the case’ (the form aitaki is found in free variation with aritaki). The verb is marked by the affect marker =tya. Elias emphatically confirms Livia’s report about the scarcity of wood and her infirmity. Although first position assessments are generally argued to establish the first speaker’s epistemic primacy, Elias’s second-position confirmation asserts his equal epistemic access to the referent situation.
Extract 2. Mariscal Cáceres, 2013 1 L tekatsi-ite (.) tsika n-a-ye-ro=ka tsitsi? te ‘There is absolutely no (wood), and where will I gather wood? 2 no-shintsi-t-aj-e naari n-anii-vai-t-e I, too, don’t have strength to go (and look for wood) 3 ovantsiposhi ((inadible)) fallow.farmland in the fallow farmland’. 4 E → ‘Gosh, it is the case. We’ll bring firewood from the bottom of the hill’.
Construction omapero ‘it is true’ + declarative clause and stand-alone tokens of omapero ‘it is true’
In second position slots, when articulated with falling information, the positive polarity verb omapero ‘it is true’ (either on its own or in combination with a declarative clause) expresses confirmation. The invariant polarity verb omapero is composed of the non-transparent initial element oma and intensifier – pero. The verb omapero ‘it is true’ often takes additional verbal morphology, for example, to specify aspect and frustrative modality. A rising intonational contour signals that the verb occurs in an interrogative construction, expressing participants’ disbelief or requesting clarification. Accordingly, the prosody provides a cue to the type of epistemic access (direct or indirect) and degree of authority the participant is claiming.
The function of confirmation is illustrated in Extract 3. The elderly Livia complains about the lack of visitors. Her complaint is cast as a polar question which she herself answers. The beginning of her self-directed response is in Spanish, and the last word is in the native language. She articulates the last word softly, as if struggling to hold back her tears. Livia’s visitor Elias, her long-time neighbor, responds to her affiliation-seeking action with the stand-alone token of omapero ‘it is true’, followed by the construction omapero + declarative clause. Elias’s confirmation of the old woman’s trouble-telling account matches Livia’s epistemic claims to the referent state of affairs. Elias’s turn in line 3 contains his evaluation of Livia’s kinfolk’s inaction, which further raises his claim to epistemic authority.
Extract 3. Mariscal Cáceres, 2013 1 L intsima iroñaka pi-ñ-ap-ak-e-ro=ma ninka well now ‘Well, have you possibly seen anybody 2 kivant-e-na-ni? no hay nadie °tekatsi-ite visit- visit me? There is nobody, absolutely nobody’. 3 E →
‘It is true. It is true that they abandoned you’.
The perception verb ñakiro ‘as you can see’
In responsive statements, the verb occurs as a stand-alone agreement token, at the beginning of the turn or after an acknowledgment token. It is a common means of upgrading one’s stance to claim epistemic primacy. The verb ñakiro ‘as you can see’ is also affiliative due to its explicit orientation toward achieving shared understanding. By directly addressing the prior participant and appealing to their newly acquired experience of the world, the hearer’s action displays affiliation and solidarity. The verb ñ-ak-i-ro [see-pfv-real-3nm.o] ‘you have seen it’ is a reduced form of the inflected verb of visual perception ñ ‘see’. The prefixal person marker pi- ‘second person subject’ is typically left out, and the verb functions as one frozen unit. Its Spanish equivalent is ya ves ‘as you can see’.
In any sequential environment, the verb ñakiro ‘as you can see’ is used to assert the changed epistemic status of another interlocutor who is understood to make a sudden discovery. The other participant’s discovery is made on the basis of observable evidence or inference (see DeLancey, 1997: 36, on the details of the ‘unassimilated knowledge’ category). The deployment of the verb ñakiro ‘as you can see’ indexes the other participant’s subordinate epistemic rights because of the speaker’s prior independent direct access to the relevant information. When the hearer employs ñakiro ‘as you can see’, he expresses a ‘knowing’ K-plus stance and epistemic advantage relative to a particular domain of knowledge. In contrast, the interlocutor has just discovered it, and accordingly, has less epistemic authority with regard to the relevant state of affairs. In particular, in the sequence in Extract 4, two tokens of ñakiro ‘as you can see’ occur in the responses articulated by Elias and Livia in lines 3 and 9, respectively. The deployment of the tokens enables the hearer to confirm a discovery of new knowledge by the prior speaker and claim a superior epistemic position by demonstrating to the prior speaker that he or she has just inferred new information to which the hearer has had access all along.
The cited Extract 4 is preceded by an extended discussion of the topography of the old trail located close by. The discussion involves two relatives of the main interlocutors. In the prior spate of talk, Livia was asked whether she had witnessed the construction of the trail, which she denies, citing her non-local provenance. She claims to have spent her youth in the area downriver. In lines 1 and 2, Livia makes an upgraded statement, formed with the exhaustive focus pronoun iritaki ‘3m.exh.foc’, that her other family members were born in the area and know its history. In line 3, Elias responds with ñakiro ‘as you can see’, to confirm Livia’s discovery of new information through logical reasoning. In lines 4–6, Livia continues her argument, making reference to shared personal experience, highly ranked as firsthand evidence among the Alto Perené. She indexes the inflected verbs ñ ‘see’ and yo ‘know’ in line 4 with the person marker a- ‘1pl.s/a’ to refer to the joint personal experience of her own and that of other people like her who are transplants from the downriver area. She asks Elias whether he witnessed the construction of the road in line 7. When Elias denies it in line 8, Livia responds with ñakiro ‘as you can see’, confirming the change of Elias’s epistemic status. In lines 9 and 10, Livia specifies her indirect access to the referent situation by identifying her father’s comments as the source of her imprecise knowledge of the past times, and citing the shared past experience of hearing little about the referent topic.
Extract 4. Mariscal Cáceres, 2013 1 L iritaki ir-eentsi-te-paye i-tzim-a-ye-tz-i jara ‘It is exactly his children (who) were born there, 2 i-yo-tz-i-ro 3 E → ‘As you can see’. 4 L aajatzita also ‘And we have seen it indeed how little we know 5 tsika i-kant-a-vai-t-a pairani tema te no-ñ-e-ro about the way they (ancestors) were long ago. I have not seen 6 naari o-ken-ant-a-ri karretera=ka how this road was (built). 7 pi-ñ-a-ve-t-ak-a-ro pairani mosho aviroka? Have you seen it, young boy?’ 8 E te te 9 L → you.have.seen.it ‘As you can see. I heard my father’s thoughts 10 apa irirori a-kim-a-vai-shi-t-a kapicheni Father about it. We heard (about it) a little bit’.
Other actions
Request for clarification
In first positions, stand-alone tokens of the verb ari ‘it is the case’ are articulated with rising intonation. They index indirect access to the referent situation and serve as downgrading strategies. The forms occur in restricted interactional environments, either at the beginning of a joint activity or at its end. The joint activities are mundane everyday tasks, such as a preparation of a meal, its consumption, making a mat, applying heated herbs to a wound, and so on. They are sometimes followed by the evaluative word kametsa ‘good’, ‘well’. In Extract 5, Ines asks her son Gregorio whether he feels okay after she squeezed the juice of a medicinal plant into his eye. In the first position slot, the stand-alone token of the verb ari ‘it is the case’ serves as a feedback-soliciting device.
Extract 5. Bajo Marankiari, 2009 1 I →
‘Okay? Is it good?’ 2 G je ari=ve o-tsink-an-ak-i-na ‘Yes, it is the case indeed that it gave me a stir’.
In second positions, stand-alone tokens of omapero ‘it is true’ sometimes serve to request additional information. It happens when the shared information is new and surprising to the hearer. A rising intonational contour signals that the verb occurs in an interrogative construction, expressing participants’ disbelief or requesting clarification. In this function, the verb indexes the participant’s secondary access to the relevant domain of knowledge and their subordinate epistemic status. In Extract 6, Livia and Clelia discuss Clelia’s daughter’s love interest. The young man is Livia’s grandson. In the preceding spate of talk, Clelia mentions her encounter with the man and his promise to send pineapples from his plantation to Clelia’s daughter. When Clelia announces that her daughter will be coming to harvest pineapples on Livia’s grandson’s land, Livia produces a request for clarification, expressed by the inflected form of the verb omapero. The request is articulated with a slightly rising intonation. Clelia responds light-heartedly and laughs, making it clear that her previous statement was a joke which she had already played on the young man.
Extract 6. Mariscal Cáceres, 2014 1 L irotaintsi o-kitso-t-an-ak-e i-tzivana-te=kia nearly ‘His pineapple plants are about to mature. 2 i-tsamai-t-ako-t-aj-e-ro je He weeded it (the pineapple field with the weeding hoe), yes’. 3 C koraki-t-aintsi no-jananiki-te o-n-kosecha-t-e be.near- ‘My child is coming to harvest 4 o-m-pimant-[ai-t-e] and sell (the harvested pineapples)’. 5 L → [ it.is.true- ‘Is it true?’ 6 C i-shiront-a=kia ja ja
‘He laughed. Ha ha ((produces a short laugh)). 7 i-kant-tz-i “airo no-pimant-tz-i-ro” He said, “I won’t sell it”’.
Promise
The construction ari ‘it is the case’ + declarative clause is often deployed in first positions to accomplish a promise in a situation when the speaker aims to convince the hearer of the veracity of the stated proposition. Especially, it happens when a promise is likely to be interpreted by the hearer as tenuous, when there is no certainty that it will be implemented. For example, in Extract 7, lines 1–3, Clelia quotes her son Sergio, who wants to come and visit with Elias. The young man insists that he will come for a visit after he buys food for Elias in La Merced. The construction ari ‘it is the case’ + declarative clause is deployed in line 2 to make a strong promise to visit. Elias responds with a suggestion to bring a cow udder, one of his favorite foods.
Extract 7. Mariscal Cáceres, 2014 1 C “arika no-ñ-ak-e i-pimant-a-ye-tz-i-ro Tsirishi-ki “When I see them selling various (food) in La Merced, 2 → it will be the case that I will call him, it will be the case that I will talk to him. 3 p-amin-i-na tsika i-saik-i=ka tio” Find it out for me where the uncle is residing (now).” 4 E p-aa-ki-t-e o-tsomi vaaka a-v-a-vai-t-ia=ta
Informing action
In the first position slot, the verb omapero ‘it is true’ codes a strong assertion. It indexes direct access to the relevant domain of knowledge. In Extract 8, Elias begins a brief story about a man who dug out gold from a cave in the uplands. His turn begins with the verb omapero ‘it is true’, inflected for progressive aspect and realis status, and marked by the modal clitic =kia ‘assertive’ to strengthen the speaker’s epistemic authority. His interlocutor Clelia responds with an upgraded statement, comprising the acknowledgment/agreement token aja and the construction ari ‘it is the case’ + declarative clause. By upgrading, Clelia raises her epistemic status from the second position slot and claims equal epistemic access to the referent situation.
Extract 8. Mariscal Cáceres, 2014 1 E → it.is.true- 2 tsika=rika o-kant-a osarintsi what year it happened, 3 ja-t-a-vi-t-acha-ri i-kiy-ako-vi-t-a-ri go- a persistent goer dug (it) out, 4 i-kant-ai-tz-i-ri “jaka i-tzim-i-ri oro”
to whom they had said, “It is here that gold is found”’. 5 C ja ari i-saik-i-ri jaka ‘Ah, it was the case that it was here’.
Allusion to the changed epistemic status of the other participant
In any sequential environment, the verb ñakiro ‘as you can see’ is used to assert the changed epistemic status of another interlocutor, who is understood to make a sudden discovery. In the first position slot, the verb ñakiro ‘as you can see’ has the particular function of facilitating the other participant’s engagement in talk. As such, the verb promotes social bonding. In Extract 9, Antonio provides granular details of obtaining a confession from a little girl accused of sorcery. Because of his firsthand knowledge of the state of affairs under consideration, Antonio has superior epistemic rights, which Gregorio does not dispute. When Antonio finishes his turn in line 3 with ñakiro ‘as you can see’, Gregorio responds with an acknowledgment token aja ‘aha’, encouraging Antonio to continue. Antonio’s interactional move in line 3 registers Gregorio’s discovery of new knowledge while ensuring that the interlocutor’s attention remains focused.
Extract 9. Karapairo, 2014 1 A a-poronkaporonka~vai-t-ak-e-ro 2 tsikapaita iroñaka o-p-a-i-t-ak-i-ri iyani-ni=ra? What did that small one give (to the victim)?’ 3 → ‘As you can see’. 4 G aja ‘Aha’. 5 A “pi-p-a-i-t-ak-i-ri=ra pi-tsavent-e” “You gave (the harmful brew) to him, confess!”
Discussion
This section presents an analysis of the lexicogrammatical means used in K-plus agreements, that is, agreements which allow a K-plus participant to raise their epistemic status from the sequentially second position. The thrust of the discussion is placed on the collateral effects of Alto Perené K-plus agreement practices. Collateral effects are broadly defined as ‘side effects of something that was selected as a means to a required end’ (Sidnell and Enfield, 2012: 313). Collateral effects are expected to arise due to the language-specific structures used for carrying out a responsive agreeing action. To capture the effects, this presentation will discuss in detail the meanings and functions of the linguistic structures used in K-plus agreements.
The Alto Perené lexicogrammatical means for expressing K-plus agreements present a system of limited options. Weak unmarked agreements in assessment sequences are coded by the free-standing agreement tokens je ‘yes’ and, in some contexts, acknowledgment tokens, such as mm, mmj, eje, aja, and ja whose basic function is to signal passive recipiency. In a situation of epistemic incongruity, only full-fledged marked agreements satisfy the second speaker’s interactional need to lay a claim of epistemic priority. Marked confirmations are defined as ‘affirmative lexical items which are not varieties of yes or no’ (Lee, 2013: 427). Marked agreeing responses involve the deployment of the morphosyntactic resources listed in Table 4.
Linguistic resources used for coding K-plus agreements.
As summarized in Table 4, full-fledged K-plus agreements could be formally expressed by the evaluative property word kametsari ‘good’ with an intensifier and/or upgraded prosody, argument focus structures, polarity verbs, or the visual perception verb. K-plus agreements are commonly coded by a stronger evaluative descriptor than the one used by the prior speaker. Typically, it is done by suffixing an intensifying morpheme (‘intensifier’ –ni or ‘exclamative’ =ve) to the evaluative property word kametsari ‘good’ cited in Table 4 (for English examples, see Pomerantz, 1984: 65). Alternatively, an evaluative statement is modified via other segmental morphology and/or prosody, as illustrated in Extract 10. In the prior segment of talk, Livia, Jose, and Elias discuss an old trail in the uplands, believed to be constructed by the Spaniards in the colonial times. In line 1, Livia produces a downgraded assessment of the trail’s walkability. Her statement contains a reference to hearsay evidence ikantzi ‘they say’ and the dubitative marker =ma on the evaluative term, which weakens her epistemic claim. Jose upgrades his second position evaluative statement in line 3 by articulating it at a high pitch and loud volume (see Ogden, 2006 for details on upgrading via phonetics). Elias assertively claims his equal (to Jose’s) epistemic rights in line 4 through the use of the clitic =ra, which in simple declarative clauses has an intensifying sense. The responses of Jose and Elias are strongly affiliative (see Pomerantz, 1984 and Lindström and Sorjonen, 2013 for a discussion of verbal resources used in affiliative responses across languages).
Extract 10. Mariscal Cáceres, 2013 1 L ikantzi kametsa-ite-ri-ni=ma a-ken-i-ro they.say be.good- 2 ir-avotsi-te a-tonk-an-ak-e ‘They say, we walk very well on their trail and (it is good) for climbing up’. 3 J →
be.good- 4 E i-kiy-avo-t-ak-e-ro=ra kametsa ‘They really did the trail-digging well’.
Next, the stand-alone argument focus pronouns iritaki ‘it is exactly him’ and irotaki ‘it is exactly her/it’ and the construction ‘focus pronoun + relative clause’ constitute another upgrading format for doing second assessments (Table 4). These exhaustive focus structures have a twofold goal of accomplishing agreements and confirming the prior assessment as being correct. In Extract 11, Ines, Ines’s husband Moises, and Ines’s younger brother Alberto talk about the malevolent rainbow spirit oye (see the ‘Community background’ section for details about cultural beliefs). The lethal spirit is believed to reside in stagnant water and contaminate a human body upon contact. The three participants have direct access to the referent situation, but Ines is projectedly a K-plus participant, being the only one who earns her living as a healer. When in line 1 Ines makes an assertive statement about the spirit’s name imposed by the Spanish-speaking settlers, Moises responds with a downgraded agreement, marked by the dubitative clitic =ma. He does not challenge Ines’s epistemic advantage. In line 4, Ines expands her original assertion by clarifying the fact that the term kiste (from Spanish, quiste ‘cyst’) is only used after the spirit oye invades the body. When Alberto identifies the aggressor by the native name in line 5, Ines delivers an upgraded confirmation. Her utterance consists of the native name of the spirit, followed by the agreement token eje and the exhaustive focus pronoun irotaki. By confirming in this way, Ines claims her superior epistemic authority on the matter under discussion from the second position slot.
Extract 11. Bajo Marankiari, 2012 1 I i-kant-a-ye-tz-i-ri virakocha kiste ‘Various outsiders call it (the spirit oye) a cyst’. 2 (0.57) 3 M ‘Perhaps, it is exactly what they say ‘cyst’’. 4 I irotaki-mache-ve-t-ak-a i-n-ki-ant-an-ak-ai=[rika] ‘It is exactly the term which is used when he (spirit) enters us’. 5 A [ ‘That rainbow spirit’. 6 I →oye eje ‘Rainbow spirit, aha, it is exactly it (the term)’.
Other practices of doing K-plus agreements (Table 4) involve the positive polarity verbs ari ‘it is the case’ and omapero ‘it is true’, constructions formed with these verbs and the visual perception verb ñakiro ‘as you can see’. As Table 4 shows, the lexicogrammatical system of resources for coding K-plus agreements exhibits a formal opposition between the presence of overt epistemic marking vis-a-vis its absence. These resources are characterized here as ‘epistemically dependent’, in Hardwig’s (1985) sense, that is, indexing epistemic authority. Unlike other agreement resources in Table 4, the epistemically dependent structures explicitly code the concepts of certainty of knowledge and new knowledge. The epistemically dependent response formats are associated with the structures indexing the speaker’s direct epistemic access. The choice of an epistemically dependent resource appears to depend on the pragmatics of a situation and the degree of intimacy between the interlocutors. This point needs to be investigated in future studies.
The epistemically dependent practices of doing K-plus agreements are hypothesized to be embedded in the context of Alto Perené cultural norms. The particular ways of doing agreements while coding epistemic stance are informed by the normative rules of this epistemic community. The structures address the speakers’ preoccupation with demonstrating access to the referent domain of knowledge. Moreover, the deployment of the epistemically dependent linguistic resources addresses the speakers’ concern with being truthful. As elaborated in the ‘Community background’ section, Alto Perené Arawaks rank highly sincerity and forthrightness. To lay a claim to epistemic authority, a second speaker selects an epistemically dependent way of accomplishing K-plus agreements to convincingly demonstrate his earnestness.
Each resource listed in Table 4 is used for expressing a K-plus agreement with the first speaker (which is signaled by their bringing sequences to close), while upgrading the second speaker’s claim to epistemic authority. The deployment of each resource introduces specific collateral effects, summarized in Table 5.
Collateral effects introduced by the linguistic structures used in K-plus agreements.
Collateral effects summarized in Table 5 arise due to the language-specific morphosyntactic tools deployed in doing K-plus agreements. This finding confirms the prediction made by Sidnell and Enfield (2012: 320–321): ‘because these tools are structurally overdetermined through their rich meanings and multiple functions, the conventionalized selection of such tools will have language-specific collateral effects on the final nature of the action’. The Alto Perené vehicles for effecting an agreeing action have rich meanings. In particular, the evaluative property word kametsari ‘good’ with an intensifier –ni or exclamative =ve and/or upgraded prosody functions both as an evaluative tool and a resource for displaying affiliation. The argument focus structures iritaki ‘it is exactly him’ and irotaki ‘it is exactly her/it’ in agreements evaluate the prior speaker’s statement as being correct, while confirming the exhaustive identification of the noun referent. The polarity verbs ari ‘it is the case’ and omapero ‘it is true’ index the speaker’s certainty of knowledge and assert his sincerity. The visual perception verb ñakiro ‘as you can see’ signals solidarity and foregrounds the changed epistemic status of the prior speaker, who is supposed to have made a sudden discovery.
Conclusion
The study has sketched out the language-specific practices of doing K-plus agreements in Alto Perené Kampa (Arawak), Peru. The practices of doing K-plus agreements constitute a limited set of options. The practices have a function of accomplishing confirmation of the prior speaker’s assessment and raising the hearer’s epistemic rights from the second position slot. The K-plus response formats comprise the evaluative property word kametsari ‘good’ with an intensifier and/or upgraded prosody, argument focus structures, two polarity verbs ari ‘it is the case’ and omapero ‘it is true’, and the visual perception verb ñakiro ‘as you can see’. This study has demonstrated that in Alto Perené K-plus agreement practices, various collateral effects arise from the properties of linguistic structures used for accomplishing an agreeing action.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I thank Adella Edwards for drawing a map of the area and Brigitta Flick for proofreading the final draft. I acknowledge with gratitude the useful feedback from Angeliki Alvanoudi and an anonymous reviewer.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: I am grateful to the native community of Alto Perené for their contribution to this research, and to James Cook University (JCU Faculty Grant 2015 and Language and Culture Research Centre) and Jacobs Research Funds, Whatcom Museum Foundation, Bellingham for funding my 2015 fieldwork.