This conversation-analytic study examines a type of action accomplished through a reversed polarity question responding to initial assessments in everyday Japanese conversation. This study demonstrates that RPQs deployed in this specific position express alternative views to initial assessments by appealing to participants’ common sense or knowledge and index participants’ epistemic symmetry over a particular assessable. These RPQs do not simply convey the speakers’ disagreement with initial assessments, however, but are designed to be situated as ‘new’ first assessments by triggering the (...) conditional relevance of the question–answer adjacency pair, thereby inviting agreement from the prior speaker. This study also reveals two commonly observable practices by which the speaker secures the participants’ epistemic symmetry over a particular assessable and thereby creates the basis for producing RPQs. It is further shown that these two practices can affect the strength of disaffiliation expressed by the RPQ. (shrink)

This article extends prior conversation analytic research on the preference organization of sequence-initiating actions. Across two languages, this article examines one such action: explicitly soliciting an account for human conduct. Prior work demonstrates that this action conveys a challenging stance towards the warrantability of the accountable event/conduct. When addressees are somehow responsible for the accountable event/conduct, explicit solicitations of accounts are frequently critical of, and thus embody disaffiliation with, addressees. This article demonstrates that, when explicit solicitations of accounts embody disaffiliation, (...) they are systematically ‘withheld’ and, thus, can be characterized as ‘dispreferred’ actions. This article also examines: a) deviant cases, where account solicitations are not withheld, which is a practice for embodying aggravated disaffiliation; and b) negative cases, where account solicitations actually embody affiliation, and as such are typically treated as preferred actions and not withheld. (shrink)