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Paper short abstract

This study investigates how L2 Japanese learners manage epistemic stance in interaction with L1 Japanese peers, and how they calibrate it to their interlocutor, using L1 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 choose 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 deference to social roles based on seniority or specialized experience.

Our previous research on L2 Japanese found that stance-marking is variously felicitous depending on whether participants’ mutual epistemic positions are appropriately calibrated. We proposed that social friction arises 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' over the other conversation participants. Since L2 speakers are often 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, they can unintentionally come across as categorical or patronizing during discussions. What is observable in such cases is the design of the turn: whether or not it is calibrated to a recipient who may hold epistemic rights over the matter at hand — a distinction we describe as dialogic versus monologic stance-taking.

We therefore examine learners’ management of epistemic stance through their use of modal markers (including to omou; I think, tabun; maybe), and other discourse markers, by comparing the same learners’ L2 Japanese with their English talk, in interactions with L1 Japanese peers. The study addresses 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.