"you really were taking the game to Arsenal". Mobilising response through epistemic status and epistemic stance in televised post-match interviews in premier league football.

This paper focuses on statement questions in UK premier league post-match interviews (PMIs). PMIs are shown to be differentiated by an unusually high proportion of statement questions and tag questions involving assertions and appraisals with distinctive patterns of turn design (including prosodic packaging), sequence organisation and preference organisation. Moreover, in contrast to statement questions in other institutional settings (Heritage and Roth 1995, Xiang 2012) and in mundane settings (Pomerantz 1980), statement questions in PMIs involve assertions and appraisals of aspects of the match to which both IR and IE both have epistemic access (Heritage 2012, Heritage and Raymond 2005). The analysis demonstrates how the distinctive sequence organisation of PMIs emerges from the turn design resources, including epistemic territories, shown by Stivers and Rossano (2010) to mobilise a response in the context of assessments. Furthermore, the turn design and sequence organisation function to index both epistemic asymmetry and institutional asymmetry.