Elise Kärkkäinen

Epistemic stance in English conversation : a description of its interactional functions, with a focus on I think

This book is the first corpus-based description of epistemic stance in conversational American English. It argues for epistemic stance as a pragmatic rather than semantic notion: showing commitment to the status of information is an emergent interactive activity, rooted in the interaction between conversational co-participants. The first major part of the book establishes the highly regular and routinized nature of such stance marking in the data. The second part offers a micro-analysis of I think , the prototypical stance marker, in its sequential and activity contexts. Adopting the methodology of conversation analysis and paying serious attention to the manifold prosodic cues attendant in the speakers’ utterances, the study offers novel situated interpretations of I think . The author also argues for intonation units as a unit of social interaction and makes observations about the grammaticization patterns of the most frequent epistemic markers, notably the status of I think as a discourse marker.

Taking a stance on emotion: affect, sequence, and intersubjectivity in dialogic interaction

Abstract This paper explores the domain of affect and emotion as they arise in interaction, from the perspective of stance, sequence, and dialogicality. We seek to frame the issue of affective display as part of a larger concern with how co-participants in interaction construct the socioaffective and sociocognitive relations that organize their intersubjectivity, via collaborative practices of stance taking. We draw mainly on two research traditions, conversation analysis and the dialogic turn in sociocultural linguistics, focusing on their treatments of affect, emotion, and intersubjectivity. Key ideas from the respective approaches are the role of sequence in shaping the realization and interpretation of stance, and dialogic resonance as a process of alignment between subsequent stances. We present a view of stance as a triplex act, achieved through overt communicative means, in which participants evaluate something, and thereby position themselves, and thereby align with co-participants in interaction. Alignment is argued to operate as a continuous variable rather than a dichotomy, as participants subtly monitor and modulate the “stance differential” between them, while often maintaining a strategic ambiguity. Finally, we comment on the rich contributions to the study of stance, affect, and intersubjectivity in interaction made by the collaborators in this special issue.

Linguistic and embodied formats for making (concrete) offers

The article examines how discourse participants use language, the body and the local interactional and material context in the construction of offers. The data consist of eight hours of video recordings of everyday interactions in English and Finnish, and conversation analysis is used as the method. We focus on offers that make available to the recipient some concrete referent or material object or artifact in the current situation, that is, ‘concrete offers’. The article shows that such offers can be conceptualized as consisting of two interlinked actions, one identifying the referent and the other explicating the offer. The article further argues that the frequent accomplishment over time of such complex actions may contribute to the emergence of a set of social action formats for offers. This action combination is explored by discussing offers that range from fully linguistically articulated ones, to types where embodied actions take an increasingly central role.

Preferred argument structure and subject role in American English conversational discourse

Abstract Preferred argument structure (PAS) refers to the observed tendency for speakers to avoid expressing more than one lexical argument or more than one piece of new information in a clause, and the tendency to avoid having lexical or new referents in the transitive subject (A) position (Du Bois, 1987). Distribution of new information has been claimed by Du Bois to follow an ergative pattern, in that S, or subject of an intransitive verb, patterns with O, or object of a transitive verb even in non-ergative languages. The present study shows that PAS as formulated above can also be seen to hold for American English conversational discourse. However, the hypothesis of an ergative structuring of discourse is not borne out by my data, as S in general patterns with A rather than O, or the same constraints hold for S as for A. This is hypothesized to be due to the difference in genre, as Du Bois used the Pear Story narratives as data, but above all to the difference in language, as in English the starting-point function has been grammaticized in subjecthood and subjects mainly carry given information (Chafe, 1994). Yet there are some differences in information flow properties between A and S: S is more flexible and tends to accommodate a more varied group of referents and to respond to differences in genre and type of interaction more readily than A.

Position and Scope of Epistemic Phrases in Planned and Unplanned American English

High-frequency epistemic phrases like I think, I don’t know, I guess, I thought, and I remember have received considerable attention in linguistic research on different varieties of English. This chapter offers a quantitative survey of their occurrence in American English conversation, in a large database of almost 23 hours, with special reference to the semantic-pragmatic scope of these items. The chapter explores whether their scope extends over something yet to be verbalized in the turn-inprogress (forward scope), as opposed to having something in their scope that was just verbalized in the immediately preceding turn-so-far (backward scope). These issues will be examined primarily in two varieties of spoken American English, unplanned everyday speech and planned institutional speech, with a third variety, task-related talk, as a reference point in between. It is established that in all three data sets, there is a clear prevalence of clausal over phrasal scope and a prevalence of a forward-looking scope over scope pointing back in the immediately preceding discourse. The chapter further argues that the differences in scope observed between British English and American English are not really due to different types of data (i.e. that planned and/or monologic speech types in general manifest a different pattern from everyday dialogic speech), but more likely reflect a deeper grammaticization difference between the two varieties of English.

On digressing with a stance and not seeking a recipient response

Abstract This paper argues that stanced digressions, or inserts, produced by speakers in the midst of extended (multi-unit) turns, are not primarily designed to get a response from the recipient(s). The paper shows that speakers employ various linguistic, prosodic, and embodied resources that make the digression recognizable as such, i.e., of subsidiary status in the talk, and therefore as not in need of a response. A lack of response is treated as unproblematic by both the digression speaker and by the recipients, as both parties primarily orient to the turn as a multi-unit turn still in progress. The paper first examines audio data and keeps the linguistic format relatively constant, by focusing on inserts prefaced by I guess and consisting of explicitly evaluative or epistemic material. It subsequently opens up the analysis to video data and also to other kinds of stanced digressions.