A Conversation Analytic Study on the Functions of the Discourse Marker “You know” in a Video-Mediated Task-Based Context

Discourse markers (DMs), also referred to as markers or particles, are integral resources in talk-in-interaction, understood as the context-sensitive and sequential organization of language through which participants collaboratively accomplish social actions. Adopting a Conversation Analytic (CA) approach, the study draws on a dataset of video-recorded dyadic interactions involving 30 EFL participants from Türkiye and Tunisia, engaged in collaborative tasks in a video-mediated task-based context. The analysis focuses on a subset of analytically selected cases in which participants demonstrably orient to “you know” in the unfolding sequence of talk. The data gathered from the participants were transcribed and analyzed using Jefferson Transcription Conventions (2004), Mondada Multimodal Conventions (2016) and Balaman and Sert’s transcrition conventions for on-screen activity (2017); thereby ensuring that the multimodal interactions were as accurately depicted as possible. The findings show that “you know” is recurrently deployed across a range of sequential environments. Across these environments, its interactional contribution is not fixed but emerges from its sequential positioning and from participants’ displayed orientations in subsequent turns and embodied conduct. In particular, “you know” is consistently associated with the management of recipiency and the maintenance of progressivity in interaction. By grounding the analysis in participants’ observable orientations, the study demonstrates how a recurrent discourse marker is adapted to the contingencies of video-mediated, task-based interaction.