Registering the receipt of information with a modulated stance: A study of ne-marked other-repetitions in Japanese talk-in-interaction

One thing people typically do in a responsive utterance is to display receipt of information given in a prior utterance, and among the various formats for displaying receipt is repetition of (part of) a prior utterance, which is called other-repetition. In this paper, we focus on one linguistic resource in Japanese for modulating the stance displayed through other-repetition. That is, addition of the pragmatic particle ne, a marker of shared information between the speaker and the hearer, at the end of a repeated item. Using the framework of Interactional Linguistics, we investigate the interactional characteristics of ne-marked other-repetitions in Japanese conversation through comparison with other-repetitions that have no particle. Based on an examination of naturally occurring conversation, we argue that while other-repetition with no particle indicates that the speaker has received something he or she did not recognized, other-repetition with ne indexes that the speaker already has some knowledge regarding the repeated item. Thus, when used as a third-position response following an adjacency pair (Schegloff, 2007), other-repetition with ne can indicate that the information provided in the prior turn is nothing new or unexpected. In addition, when used as a second-position response, ne-added other-repetition can express that the repeated item is something that he or she already knows and that he or she has a shared understanding with the prior speaker.