Agreement as a Multidimensional Action. When a speaker makes an assessment, states a viewpoint, or offers an interpretation about an issue in conversation (henceforth, the “first statement”1) it becomes relevant for another speaker to reciprocate with his or her view about the same issue (henceforth, the “second statement”). Thus, the consecutive statements compose an “adjacency pair” (Xxxxxxxxx and Sacks 1973). While the first statement can be a vehicle for various actions such as compliments and complaints, the significance of a second statement is conditioned by the first statement, and it is inevitably understood as either an agreement or disagreement with the first statement (Xxxxxxxxx 1984:63). Researchers have investigated characteristics of agreement in contrast with disagreement and have pointed out that they are not symmetrical, unprejudiced alternative responses. Instead, agreement is not only socially but also structurally preferred to disagreement (e.g., Xxxxxxxxx 1984; Heritage 1984b; Xxxxx 1987; Xxxxxxxxx 2007; Xxxx 1999). When an agreement is produced, the gap between it and the first assessment is minimized and it contains explicit components of agreement, while disagreements are usually delayed and do not contain explicit components of the action. The distinction of agreement and disagreement is the most basic and perceptible stance marked by a second statement, but it is not the only relevant stance. Xxxxxxx and Xxxxxxx (1987) call assessment sequences “an assessment activity” to capture diverse types of actions involved other than assessment per se, which may include achievement and display of congruent understanding of the events, achievement of social organization, and achievement of organization of affect and emotion . Agreement, therefore, can be regarded as an action in which a variety of stances of the speaker are embodied. Heritage (2002) focuses on one aspect of such stances relevant to the design of agreements in English conversation: whether an agreeing speaker claims to have “epistemic independence”—i.e., independent access to an issue on which an evaluation is made—and who claims to be the “epistemic authority”—i.e., relative knowledgeability about an issue. According to Heritage, speakers of agreements tend to be inferred to be “merely agreeing” and epistemically dependent upon the speaker of the first assessment (Heritage 2002:200). A change-of-state token oh (Heritage 1984a) prefacing an agreement is shown to be a means of overriding that inference and claiming...
