ABSTRACT
Talk-in-interaction is inferentially rich. Interpretations of and assumptions about people and events are made available in the way that utterances are designed and the activities they accomplish. We noted some inferentially sensitive features of the attributive sequence in the last chapter. So, for example, we observed how first position turns are designed so that the psychic is not heard to be making a statement about the sitter which draws from a paranormal source; and we saw how psychics’ responses to extended sitter confirmations exhibit their tacit understanding that the demonstrative power of the subsequent attributive turn is threatened. In this chapter we focus more explicitly on the inferential orientation of psychics’ discourse. This means we will be less concerned with the sequential organization of discursive actions, and concentrate on the way that utterances propose particular versions of the world.
