Language-specific considerations of the development of L2 grammar-for-interaction: The case of ich weiß nicht “I don’t know” and keine Ahnung “no clue” in L2 German

Sam Schirm, Universität Bielefeld
Sophia Fiedler, Université de Neuchâtel

Since the ‘social turn’ in second language acquisition (or ‘SLA’) research — a movement calling for a shift away from cognitivist conceptualizations and towards emic accounts of SLA (see Firth & Wagner, 1997) — conversation analysis (CA) has contributed its theories and methodologies to the field. CA studies have investigated, for example, the organization of interaction in the language classroom (e.g., Hellermann, 2008) and language learning inside (e.g., Fasel Lauzon & Pekarek Doehler, 2013) as well as outside (e.g., Eskildsen, 2018; Eskildsen & Theodórsdóttir, 2017; Theodórsdóttir, 2018) the L2 classroom. A central contribution of CA-for-SLA (see Seedhouse, 2004) has been its investigations of interactional competence (He & Young, 1998; Young, 2000). Conversation analysis conceptualizes interactional competence (or ‘IC’) as the ability to deploy ‘methods’ (see Garfinkel, 1967, p. vii) to recognizably perform social actions in interaction (Pekarek Doehler, 2018, 2019b). CA studies of IC of the past two decades have described how L2 speakers develop methods to, for example, open storytellings more recognizably, thereby more effectively securing co-participant alignment to the storytelling activity (Pekarek Doehler & Berger, 2018); or to take the floor more efficiently by orienting to both transition relevance places (TRPs) and to local sequential organization (Cekaite, 2007).

In more recent years, interactional linguistics — which uses the methodologies of CA to investigate the function of linguistic structures (in tandem with other multimodal resources) in interaction (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 2018) — has repeatedly described L2 speakers use of language to meet their local interactional needs. For example, in their study of word searches by one L2 French speaker, Pekarek Doehler & Berger (2019) found that the speaker went from using the multi-word expression comment on dit ‘how do you say’ in its ‘literal’ sense — to recruit assistance in finding a solution — to using the expression as a floor-holding device that marks the speaker’s own cognitive search (see also Pekarek Doehler & Skogmyr Marian, 2022). That is, comment on dit became a resource for the management of turn-taking and, thus, for the organization of interaction (Pekarek Doehler, 2018; Pekarek Doehler & Berger, 2019; Pekarek Doehler & Skogmyr Marian, 2022). A focus on linguistic form in L2 interaction and IC development led to the conceptualization of a grammar-for-interaction, that is, a “functional use of language patterns for carrying out actions (e.g., requesting, accounting, promising, reporting) and accomplishing interaction-organizational purposes, such as managing floor-holding and speaker transition […] or alerting coparticipants to incipient next actions” (Pekarek Doehler & Eskildsen, 2022, p. 5, emphasis added).

With its focus on linguistic structure, IL recognizes that different languages offer their speakers a different array of resources to accomplish interaction (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 2018). IL has as an explicit aim at “cross-linguistic analysis and comparison” of practices in order to uncover how linguistic resources both shape interaction and are reflexively shaped by interaction (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 2018, p. 16). The development of a grammar-for-interaction could therefore be shaped by the linguistic resources and structures available in the L2. IL research on IC, however, has not yet considered the interplay between language-specific resources and the development of L2 grammar-for-interaction. 

In our study, we investigate the development of grammar-for-interaction in L2 German by one speaker — Nina — over the course of a 12-month sojourn to Germany. We use IL to track the change-in-use of linguistic structures specific to German to investigate the relationship between its linguistic resources and the development of an L2 grammar-for-interaction. We chose four sets of linguistic structures that cover different aspects of German grammar:

– Lexis: the use of the adverb also ‘so’ as a discourse marker

– Syntax and subordinating conjunctions: verb placement following the conjunction weil ‘because’

– Multi-word constructions: Ich weiß nicht “I don’t know” and keine Ahnung “no clue”

– Syntax and complement-taking predicates: Verba sentiendi like glauben “to believe”, denken “to think”, and meinen “to mean”

In this squib, we exemplify the questions we are tackling in our project by presenting preliminary results of our analysis of the third set of these linguistic structures: Ich weiß nicht “I don’t know” (hereafter IWN) and keine Ahnung “no clue” (hereafter KA). Broadly speaking, both function as claims of no knowledge; both also have interactional functions, some of which they share with one another (see Bergmann, 2017; Helmer et al., 2016; Helmer & Deppermann, 2017). However, whereas German speakers use both constructions regularly in interaction to claim no or insufficient knowledge, other languages — such as English (see Beach & Metzger, 1997; Weatherall, 2011) and French (see Pekarek Doehler, 2016, 2019a, 2022) — rely predominantly on one resource, namely equivalents of I don’t know (see also Pekarek Doehler et al., 2021, for a cross-linguistic comparison of I don’t know). German thus has a sharing and division of labour between two semantically related structures (IWN and KA) that does not exist across other languages. In our longitudinal analysis of Nina’s use of IWN and KA, we seek to uncover: 1) If the division of labour is visible in Nina’s use of IWN and KA in her everyday interactions, and 2) If (and how) the division of labour shapes her trajectory of development of IWN and KA in terms of grammar-for-interaction.

We base our preliminary analyses on instances of IWN and KA from 3 hours of Nina’s audio recorded everyday interactions with her German-speaking peers, 2 hours taken from the first four months of Nina’s sojourn, and 1 hour from the final two months. The (albeit limited) quantitative evidence suggests a progressive division of labour between IWN and KA (see Table 1). In months 2-4, Nina relies predominantly on IWN, with 12 occurrences of IWN (6/hour) and only one of KA (0.5/hour). There is also one occurrence of the non-idiomatic kein Idee “no idea” at the beginning. By months 11-12, Nina has diversified her structures for claiming no knowledge. In terms of IWN, she additionally uses the past-tense form ich wusste nicht “I didn’t know” as well as a semantically related form kenn ich nicht “I don’t know”. Her use of KA also increases noticeably to a frequency of 4/hour. In addition, at the end of her sojourn, she uses English I don’t know in her German interactions, indicating a further diversification of her resources for doing claiming no knowledge. Our analyses here will only address her use of IWN and KA, but we comment on the implications of the re-emergence of I don’t know following our analyses.

Table 1: Nina’s occurrences of IWN and KA (and related variants) over time.

Our sequential analyses complicate the picture of diversification. While we do observe IWN and KA going from literal claims of no knowledge to taking on interactional organizational functions, there is overlap in the functionality similar to that described in Bergmann (2017). As an example of a ‘literal’ use of IWN from the beginning of Nina’s sojourn, let us take Excerpt 1, from Nina’s second month in Germany. Here, Nina (NIN) is telling Anna (ANN) and Karla (KAR) about the movie Warm Bodies, in which a zombie and a normal woman fall in love (see lines 10-13). In line 17, Anna asks Nina if Warm Bodies is available for viewing on the streaming service Amazon Prime.

Excerpt 1: NIN_2019.09.03_12:34-12:50 Amazon Prime²

Anna’s question in line 17 is a yes/no interrogative (YNI, see Raymond, 2003) requesting information from Nina, in the form of a yes or no answer. Nina gives neither; after a silence in line 19, Nina responds in line 20 with ich WEISS nicht “I don’t know”, adding vielLEICHT “maybe”. She then makes no attempt to find out whether Warm Bodies is available on Amazon Prime; she continues with a positive assessment of the movie (line 21). With IWN in line 20, Nina is claiming no knowledge to account for not being able to provide the information Anna requested.

Nina’s IWN in Excerpt 1 represents a canonical function of I don’t know across languages: to claim no knowledge in response to an information question (Beach & Metzger, 1997; Pekarek Doehler, 2016). It also represents the majority of Nina’s IWN uses at the beginning of the sojourn: 7 out of 12 are claims of no knowledge following information questions. In most cases, Nina continues her turn by providing on-topic information (e.g., in Excerpt 1 her positive assessment of the movie in line 21), but in no case does she attempt to find the information requested.

In the data at the end of Nina’s sojourn there is no instance of her using IWN or KA as responses to information questions; rather, IWN and KA appear exclusively in multi-unit turns — particularly in storytellings. This is the case in Excerpt 2, taken from Nina’s final month in Germany. Here she is talking with L1 German speaker Susa (SUS), who just prior to the excerpt told Nina about her experience seeing P!nk in concert. In response, Nina starts a telling in line 01 about a friend’s experience seeing Lady Gaga in concert. Focus is Nina’s KA in line 05.

Excerpt 2: NIN_2020.07.26_02:14-02:32 Lady Gaga

In line 03, Nina projects reported speech from her friend. The reported speech begins in line 04 with DIE un:d “she an:d”. With the conjunction un:d “an:d” Nina projects the name of another performer (see Auer, 2005, on projection). The lengthening on un:d and the 1.2-second silence in line 04 suggest, however, Nina is experiencing troubles of production and has entered a word search (see Goodwin, 1983). In line 05, rather than produce the projected name of another performer, Nina utters keine AHnung “no clue”. She continues with an ob-“whether”-clause, in which she names two potential performers: P!nk or Katy Perry. Her keine AHnung is prosodically integrated into the ob-clause. In relation to her und in line 04, the ob-clause does not fulfill the syntactic projection; however, it does contain the names of two candidate performers, fulfilling the interactional projection from the und in terms of information content (Auer, 2005). 

In line 06, Nina resumes the reported speech, assessing them as not only singers; she continues with sondern (.) like “but (.) like” in line 07, which Susa collaboratively completes in line 08 with entertainer; Nina ratifies the collaborative completion with a repeat in line 09 (see Betz et al., 2013). Neither Nina nor Susa do any work at any point in the interaction to determine whether Nina’s friend had been talking about P!nk or Katy Perry. 

Excerpt 2 represents a recurring practice in Nina’s use of both KA and IWN at the end of her sojourn. That is, in a storytelling, Nina initiates a word search, utters IWN or KA, then gives an inexact or uncertain word search solution in a clausal format, then resumes the telling, without any further attempts at finding the solution. Nina thereby orients to a preference for progressivity in interaction, providing information at the level of granularity required and available for the storytelling but not putting the interaction on hold (again) to seek out the precise information. In this context, IWN/KA is functioning as an epistemic hedge, “displaying that [Nina] is not fully committed” to her word search solution (Weatherall, 2011, p. 317). In other words, in storytelling contexts, Nina is using IWN and KA to preface “good enough” word search solutions in a clausal format. Bergmann (2017) describes a similar function for IWN and KA, albeit prefacing “good enough” information in phrasal (e.g., as a noun phrase) rather than in clausal formats. Nina’s use of IWN and KA at the end of her sojourn thus converge with observations of L1 speakers and, indeed, with findings on I don’t know in other languages (see, e.g., Weatherall, 2011, on I don’t know-prefaced approximations in English).

Our preliminary longitudinal analysis of Nina’s use of IWN and KA do suggest a diversification of resources for claiming no or insufficient knowledge; whereas she relies predominantly on IWN at the beginning of her sojourn, at the end she has added KA to her repertoire. However, our limited collection suggests that there is not a division of labour between IWN and KA at the end of her sojourn; they both serve as epistemic hedges that preface word search solutions in storytelling environments. In terms of grammar-for-interaction, our preliminary collection suggests some development of interactional organizational functions, albeit ones that are related to the constructions’ functions in claiming no knowledge: As a preface to “good enough” word search solutions, Nina uses the constructions to indicate no further work will be done to find a more precise solution, thereby orienting to a preference for progressivity. 

One issue we have not addressed in this squib is that of the emergence (or, perhaps, reemergence) of English I don’t know by Nina. Unfortunately, that issue goes beyond the scope of this squib. However, we can make a few comments about how we will approach those instances. While it may be tempting to consider these uses of I don’t know as, in some ways, failures to speak German “correctly”, or that Nina is “relying” on her L1 (English) in her German interactions, the emic approach of IL and CA instructs us not consider such occurrences as a priori interactional “failures”; rather, we ought to consider Nina’s uses of I don’t know as interactional successes — until her or her co-interactants treat them as less than successful. Nina has access to two German constructions for claiming no knowledge: IWN and KA. These cases of I don’t know are thus Nina choosing an English resource over semantically identical German constructions. Treating Nina’s I don’t knows as interactionally successful is furthermore in line with Firth & Wagner (1997) call for more emic approaches to SLA, ones that treat L2 speakers as successful interactants instead of deficient learners.

Our current collections are limited by the amount of data transcribed; while our corpus consists of nine hours of Nina’s recorded interactions with her German-speaking peers, only three hours have been transcribed thus far. As we transcribe the remaining six hours, we hope to build our collection and further our investigation of the interplay between a language-specific array of grammatical resources for interaction and the development of L2 grammar-for-interaction.

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1.  kennen and wissen (here conjugated as kenn and weiß) are both equivalents of English to know. The German verbs, however, encode different kinds of knowledge: kennen is ‘to be familiar with’ or ‘to be aware of’ whereas wissen is more ‘to have in one’s mind’ or ‘to grasp’. See Dudenredaktion (n.d.-a, n.d.-b) for more on the distinction between wissen and kennen.
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2.  All transcripts were prepared using GAT 2 conventions for a basic transcript, with some additional conventions of a fine transcript to capture aspects of tempo and volume (Selting et al., 2011). Where necessary for understanding, we have provided below the original line of transcript a translation into English, in italics.
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