Orienting to knowledge as remarkable: The newsmark be'emet (‘in-truth’) in Hebrew conversation

Abstract

The paper examines a practice of responding to informing actions implemented by the Hebrew form be'emet (lit. ‘in truth’). Based on everyday conversation data, it argues that the newsmark be'emet attributes remarkability, of whatever degree or valence, to the prior speaker's informing. This can be done to endorse a similar stance already offered by the informer, or it can be independently proffered by the recipient. The study shows how the negotiation of remarkability unfolds in be'emet-embedding sequences, focusing on cases where recipients use be'emet to align with their positioning as the less knowledgeable or newly informed party, as previously projected by the informer, or to withhold acceptance or contest this positioning. These different options are grounded in the epistemic and social positioning of the informer and recipient and are contextualized through the multimodal design of the be'emet-turn. The study proposes that the lack of specificity of be'emet is an affordance of such a response token since it opens up the possibility of combinedly dealing with other exigencies established by the larger activity, as well as allowing for an off-record negotiation of problems of epistemic alignment between the parties. On a broader level, the paper highlights how more general analyses of response tokens in the field of pragmatics can be enhanced by micro-analytic investigations of individual newsmarks within their local sequential context.