Claim-Backing and Other Explanatory Genres in Talk

Abstract

How do explanations appear in conversation? We distinguish claimbacking from more familiar social psychology genres of ordinary explanation (causal attribution, reason-giving, excuse and justification). Claim-backing is the use of explanations to warrant the truth of what one has said, or the way one has said it. The way that people back claims reveals the mutual knowledge on which their appeals succeed and fail. We examine people's use of logically entailing backings and compare them with looser (but more common) semantic relations, among which we identify diagnostic feature backing, amplification and reaffirmation. Finally, we distinguish between claims of content and of conversational move. We end with a brief discussion of the mutual knowledge invoked by claimbacking and its role in the rhetoric of explanation and argumentation.