Experiential Assessments and Attributive Assessments: Managing Territories of Experience in Conversation

• In Event: 470 - Regular Session. Social Action and Epistemics

Abstract

An assessment can be formulated either as a statement of a referent's general attribute (e.g., "The asparagus pie was so good.") or as a report of the speaker's personal experience with or attitude toward the referent (e.g., "I love it."). While the former type of assessments (attributive assessments) are used as the 'basic' form of assessments, the latter (experiential assessments) are found to be produced only 'for cause'. Using conversation analysis, this paper examines the distribution of these two types of assessments in Japanese ordinary conversation and investigates when and for what ends experiential assessments are produced. The findings are two-fold. First, when produced to refer to the speaker's own experience, experiential assessments can be a resource to claim epistemic independence in the second position (Heritage 2002). They allow speakers to shift the frame of assessing from the one suggested by the speaker of an initial assessment on which to base their claim of epistemic independence. Under certain circumstances, experiential assessments can further serve to differentiate the speakers' epistemic standpoint from that of the interlocutor. Second, when experiential assessments are produced to refer to something that belongs to the recipient, they can serve as an index of respect to the recipient's territories of experience. Experiential assessments produced as such can be a launcher of interactional negotiation as to what referent is mutually accessible and what referents belong to one of the parties.

Author

• Kaoru Hayano, Ochanomizu University