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Paper short abstract

This study investigates how L2 Japanese learners manage epistemic authority, using L1 and L2 English as comparative baselines. It explores whether they orient toward relative epistemic rights, language-specific conventions, or communication habits from L1.

Paper long abstract

Research in interactional sociolinguistics suggests that social norms affect how speakers chose to exhibit knowledge or expertise (Kamio, 1994, 1997; Stivers et al., 2011). Conversation participants track ‘epistemic authority’ (the socially sanctioned right to claim knowledge) because knowledge impacts the social standing of everyone involved (Heritage & Raymond, 2005). While this authority is often explicitly signaled through linguistic markers, it is also ‘granted’ by virtue of deference to social roles or social categories based on seniority or specialized experience.

In our previous research on L2 Japanese, indeed we found that stance-marking can be variously felicitous depending on whether participants’ mutual epistemic positions are appropriately calibrated. We proposed that social friction could arise not from a speaker asserting their own knowledge, but from displaying that knowledge inappropriately relative to others. Even when a speaker has subjective authority (or a legitimate claim to information), unmitigated display of knowledge may suggest 'intersubjective epistemic primacy' (or a higher degree of knowledge) over the other conversation participants. Since L2 speakers often find themselves in a socially asymmetrical position when discussing matters pertaining to the target language or culture with L1 speakers – by definition endowed with more extensive expertise – if they fail to signal their relative knowledge position, L2 users can unintentionally come across as categorical or patronizing during discussions.

Based on these observations, we set out to examine learners’ management of epistemic authority through their use of modal markers (including to omou; I think, tabun; maybe), and other discourse markers, by comparing English speakers’ L2 Japanese with Japanese speakers’ L2 English in interactions with interlocutors of varying status (L1 vs L2 users, teachers vs peers). The present study aims to fill a double research gap: while epistemic stance-taking has been examined in pedagogic tasks in L2 English (e.g. Jakonen & Morton, 2015; Kääntä, 2014, among others) equivalent data for L2 Japanese learners is missing. Moreover, research currently lacks cross-linguistic studies that evaluate whether the marking of a speaker's epistemic stance is shaped by participants’ orientation to relative epistemic rights, language-specific conventions, or the transfer of communication conventions from L1.