Alternative responses to assessments

Abstract

Introduction In this chapter we examine part of the paradigm of utterance types used to agree with a prior assessment in Finnish. We use the term “assessment” in the same sense as Pomerantz (1984) and Goodwin and Goodwin (1992), for example, to refer to an evaluative act, typically performed by an utterance that contains a negative or positive predication of a referent or a state of affairs expressed by the subject or the object of the sentence. Alternatively, the assessable is something that can be inferred from the context. We focus on cases in which agreement is accomplished by presenting “the same evaluation” as that of a previous assessment (cf. Pomerantz 1984: 66–68). In each of them, the recipient repeats part of the preceding assessment by her co-participant, leaving out the assessment term. Figure 9.1 shows the range of alternatives; those we will discuss are marked in boldface. The schema is a simplification in which we have, for the purposes of illustration, used as the first assessment a prototypical clause-type for assessing something: a predicate nominal clause with an evaluating adjective complement. In practice, there is variation in the clause type, and the evaluating element, “X” in our schema, is often a more complex phrase. Equally there are other verbs besides the copula “ on ” used in this context, but “ on ” is by far the most frequent one.

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