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In request for confirmation (RfC) sequences, interlocutors negotiate their social positions regarding access and rights to knowledge. The article presents an overview of a quantitative analysis of 200 RfCs and their responses in German conversations to highlight the relevant linguistic resources speakers of the language deployed to position themselves vis-à-vis a confirmable proposition. In German RfCs, modal particles and tags play an important role in expressing the requester’s epistemic stance; explicit inference marking is used less frequently. Responses usually include response tokens (among others doch as a token specialized for disconfirming negatively formatted RfCs) and an expansion. The article shows that such expansions do important work to tailor the response to the situated informational needs of the requester in a cooperative way beyond the constraints of type-conformity.

Sounds spoken on the inbreath have been shown to be common in the world's languages, and in the Nordic languages ingressive speech seems to be especially frequent. The present study focuses on Finnish and Danish response particles spoken on the inbreath, by examining their uses in everyday talk-in-interaction in corpora of recorded interactions. The particles we examine and their non-ingressive counterparts can perform confirming and acknowledging actions. We analyze the particles as receipts to answers to questions, as responses to questions, as responses to assessments, and as responses to affiliation-seeking utterances. In these positions, the ingressive particles turn out to index that the content of the previous turn was already sufficiently established and, consequently, that there is nothing to add. In cases where an engaged response is called for, the particles are shown to have a disaffiliative potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In conversation analytic and interactional studies, some responses are analyzed as being minimal. This article explores minimality in regard to two types of answers that appear to be used interchangeably as minimal responses to yes/no questions in Estonian. The answers represent typologically different formats, particles and echo answers (verb repeats). It is argued that minimality should be defined in a sequentially sensitive manner and that the two answer formats are used to display speakers' understanding of the status of the social action implemented in the preceding question. The data come from audio recordings of phone calls and face-to-face interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]