When veracity is in the balance: Requests for reconfirmation as preliminary information receipts

Responding to new information is a recurrent task in ordinary conversation. In contrast to alternative information receipts, such as change-of-state tokens (e.g., oh), evaluative appreciations (e.g., wow), or assessments (e.g., that's nice), newsmark-type responses (e.g., really) are preliminary in the sense that they invite the informer to, at a minimum, reconfirm their previous statement, making a more definite response contingent upon the informer's reaction. As expressions of ‘ritualized disbelief’ (Heritage, 1984), newsmarks proper do not simply take the information provided at face value but question the veracity of the prior statement in a pro-forma manner to highlight its news- or noteworthiness. However, reconfirmation-seeking turns are also regularly used to genuinely call the validity of a prior statement into question and treat it as problematic.

This interactional-linguistic study investigates the whole spectrum of reconfirmation-seeking responses, alternatively referred to as ‘requests for reconfirmation’ (RfRCs), and reveals that different instances of these preliminary information receipts fall on a continuum between newsmark-like and problem-indicating RfRC uses. Through detailed sequential and multimodal analyses of reconfirmation sequences from video recordings of informal German and English face-to-face conversations, it also shows how sequential context and turn design contribute to action disambiguation and the contextualization of different epistemic, evaluative, and affective stances towards the information in question across the two languages under investigation.