The study of epistemic issues in conversation focuses on the knowledge claims that interactants assert, contest, and defend in turns at talk and sequences of interaction. Epistemic issues permeate all the topics that conversation analysts study and are central to ‘recipient design’ – the ways in which speakers design their talk to accommodate the specifics of the context and the particular others who are their interlocutors. However, the study of epistemics is complicated by the fact that CA methodology permits the attribution of subjective knowledge to participants as a part of the analytic process only if the attribution is grounded in the data of interaction. While this stipulation has tended to inhibit research on epistemics in the past, the development of the notion of epistemic stance has enabled researchers to focus on how persons present themselves as more or less knowledgeable, and have those claims upheld or contested by others. This chapter identifies and illustrates seven sources of evidence that can be used, separately and in combination, to ground analytical claims about epistemic stance and status in conversational interaction. The analysis of epistemics is shown to have deep continuities with general conversation analytic procedures used across the field.

Several kinds of relations between events often have distinct complex sentence constructions, in particular those involving degree, causation, factivity (epistemic stance), or a combination of these. Comparative and equative constructions compare degrees of a property predicated of two different referents. The strategy chosen depends on the strategy used for temporal complex sentences, at least for comparative constructions. Conditional constructions express a causal relation (content, epistemic, or speech act), but, unlike causal relations, also express a nonfactive (neutral or negative) epistemic stance toward the events. Past tense constructions are often recruited to express nonfactivity. Concessive constructions presuppose a causal relation that is unexpectedly violated; concessive conditional constructions are the nonfactive counterparts. Strategies use conjunctions recruited from conditionals or expressions of obstinacy, focus marking, and remarkable co-occurrence. Concessive conditionals use a scalar, alternative, or universal strategy to conceptualize the concessive conditional relation. Other relations, such as the comparative conditional, may also be conventionalized.

Epistemics in EMCA involves the examination of what people know, how they demonstrate their knowledge, and how they design their contributions to take into account asymmetries of knowledge. In this chapter, we investigate epistemic practices in a classroom in the children’s first year of schooling to illustrate the ways in which an EMCA approach can unpack real time trajectories of knowledge management, even in very busy classrooms.

Chapter 5 offers a novel approach to emotion with the concept of contextual mood. In contrast to individualistic notions, mood is defined as emerging from socially distributed, interactive mechanisms, which, in turn, create and sustain moods in the lived experiences of learning practices. Contextual mood as a conceptual frame makes it possible to observe and capture how emotional (affective) experiences are interwoven with cognitive engagement in learning activities. In these activities, feelings permeate actions and thoughts and emerge through stancetaking, a linguistic resource used during social interactions. The creation of a contextual mood attunes learners to particular forms of behavioral regulation as learning activities unfold. We explain how a contextual mood prompts learners to consider, utilize, and potentially contribute to a repertoire of strategies for regulating meaning-making behaviors during literacy learning.