1. Pragmatic Meaning and Cognition – Sophia S.A. Marmaridou
2. Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany and Japan - Randall Hansen
3. Cognitive Exploration of Language and Linguistics – René Dirven and Marjolijn Verspoor (Eds.)
4. Age of Static: How TV Explains Modern Britain – Phil Harrison
5. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating our Species and Making us Smarter – Joseph Henrich
6. Heroic Failure and the British - Stephanie Barczewski
7. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain - Maryanne Wolf
8. Language Soup: A Taste of How Diverse People Around the World Communicate - Kathryn A. T. Knox
9. A Place for everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical order – Judith Flanders
10. Contrastive Analysis - Carl James
11. Impossible Languages- Andrea Moro
12. Languages in the World: How History, Culture and Politics Shape Language – Jukie tetel Andresen and Phillip M. Carter
13. HHhH - Laurent Binet (Translated from the French by Sam Taylor)
14. Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offense – Jonathan Culpeper
15. Ethosyntax: Explorations in Grammar and Culture – N. J. Enfield (Ed.)
16. Second Language Speech Fluency: From Research to Practice – Parvaneh Tavakoli & Clare Wright.
17. At Day's Close: Night in Times Past – A. Roger Ekirch
18. Language Shock: Understanding the Culture of Conversation – Michael Agar
19. Possessives in English: An Exploration in Cognitive Grammar - John R. Taylor
20. I saw the Dog: How Language Works – Alexandra Aikhenvald.
21. The German War: A Nation under Arms, 1939 – 1945 – Nicholas Stargardt
22. Civilizations – Laurent Binet
23. Adjective Classes: A Cross-linguistic Typology - R. M. W. Dixon & A. Aikhenvald (Eds.)
24. Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time – Johanna Nichols
25. How to behave badly in Elizabethan England - Ruth Goodman
26. In the Land of Invented Languages: Adventures in Linguistic Creativity, Madness and Genius – Arika Okrent
27. Foundation – Isaac Asimov
28. One Man and his Bike – Mike Carter
29. The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps – Edwards Brooke Hitching
30. Operation Mincemeat – Ben Macintyre
31. L2 interactional competence and development - J.K. Hall, J. Hellermann & S.P. Doehler, (Eds.)
32. A Natural History of negation – Laurence R. Horn
33. Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadavers – Mary Roach
34. Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't RhymeAnd Other Oddities of the English Language – Arika Okrent
35. What Language Is: And What It Isn't and What It Could Be - John McWhorter
36. Inner Speech: new Voices Peter Langland-Hassan & Agustín Vicente (Eds.)
37. The Painted Bird – Jerzy Kosinski
38. Interactional Linguistics: Studying Language in Social Interaction – Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen & Margaret Selting
39. The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation – Tanya Stivers, Lorenza Mondada, Jakob Steensig (Eds.)
335. pp
This is a book of chapters by different academics looking at the ways that people go about the business of expressing their epistemic state (i.e., what they know) during mundane social interactions. The book does not deal with any of the ‘big’ questions that you might find in the Philosophy thread on this forum. Rather it deals with small scale demonstrations by participants in talk-in-interaction of what they know, do not know, might know and so on, as well as their demonstrations of what other participants know, should know, ought to know, can be expected to know and so on.
The chapters covered a variety of data from different languages, such as the turn final particle ‘yo’ in Japanese, which, among other things, claims epistemic primacy, and the particle ‘jo’ in Danish (and its Swedish version ‘ju’) which ‘address epistemic incongruence in question-answer sequences through the use of epistemic adverbs'. Other languages covered are German, Estonian, French and Mandarin.
The importance of displaying our knowledge states (and our understanding of the knowledge states of others) during interaction is demonstrated by, for instance, the discourse marker ‘you know’ in English, which is one of the most frequently occurring multi-word phrases in the language. A further example would be the expression ‘of course’ which is a very subtle and multi-functional phrase, clearly related to knowledge states and what is expected to be known. (The title of Stivers’ chapter is ‘Morality and question design: “of course” as contesting a presupposition of askability.”)
(In foreign language learning, it is the deployment of these kind of items that mark the speaker as having crossed some kind of fluency boundary. I try to teach these kinds of items intensively to my students. The difference between the Japanese markers 'Tashikani' and 'Mochiron', often translated as 'Indeed' and 'Of course' respectively, is something I have a partial, intuitive grasp of, but couldn't really explain if asked. I know they are not the same)
Then we have the issue if not knowing. (Chapter 8). When participants go on record as being in an epistemically K– state, there is a lot of work to be done to resolve the asymmetry between the prior speaker’s expectation of K+ status, (embedded in the turn design of that prior speaker’s turn, e.g. a question) and the reality of K– status in the person who utters the ‘I don’t know’ statement. ‘I don’t know’ can index disaffiliation in that the prior speaker should have predicted the K– status of the respondent, and thus avoided the projection of K+. To resolve this, speakers may attempt a ‘best guess’ to try to maintain the cooperative and affiliative trajectory of the interaction…. ‘I don’t know but…’)
There is a lot here about territories of knowledge and the ways in which who knows what can be negotiated. For example, in a doctor patient consultation, the doctor has formal, status derived rights and responsibilities in diagnosing etc. Not only is she expected to know certain things, but she is also morally obligated to know certain things. However, the patient has experientially derived epistemic rights – who knows better than yourself what the current state-of-affairs is regarding what you are experiencing healthwise? Thus there is an asymmetry about who knows what, who is expected to know what, who is obligated to know what, and so on. Who has epistemic primacy in this interaction is subject to a great deal of delicate face work.
I've hardly done justice in this brief write-up to the range of topics covered, and the depth and subtlety of the concepts investigated. All of the theorizing was based on authentic data of spoken interactions (as opposed to concocted sentences and researcher intuition). I find the arguments robust and satisfying.
A very interesting book and it has given me a lot to think about, and some good material to bring into my seminar class on Conversation Analysis.
by 
