Ilaria Riccioni

Certain-Uncertain, True-False, Good-Evil in Italian Political Speeches

The present study aimed at analyzing the communication of Certainty and Uncertainty in a corpus of Italian political speeches pre-election rallies and parliamentary speeches broadcast on television. The qualitative and quantitative analysis of the corpus shows that 1 in both kinds of speech the communication of Certainty clearly prevails over the Uncertainty; 2 the latter, even if it is at a low level, is slightly higher in parliamentary speeches than in pre-election rallies; 3 in the whole corpus a contraposition constantly occurs also between Good/Evil and True/False: every speaker, regardless of his faction, describes his own party as positive and truthful Good and True and the opposition party as negative and untruthful Evil and False.

Ignorance-unmasking questions in the Royal–Sarkozy presidential debate: A resource to claim epistemic authority

The article presents an analysis of the ways in which knowledge is displayed, contested and renegotiated in the 2007 French presidential debate between Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy. Knowledge displays can be achieved through a series of ‘neutral’ resources, such as informing, explanation or comment, or through face-damaging resources, such as questioning an unknowledgeable interlocutor to prove his inferior epistemic status (K−) and boost one’s own. The article focuses on this latter type of knowledge display where a knowledgeable participant (K+) engages in question–answer sequences with an unknowledgeable respondent (K−) in front of a third party (the audience). The article also undertakes an analysis of the multimodal strategies employed by the (K+) participant to discredit the (K−) opponent (ironic smiles and laughter). The article intends to contribute to the existent literature on epistemic stance by offering a prototypical example of incongruence between the epistemic status (K+) of the questioner and the epistemic stance he adopts (unknowing K).

Epistemic Stance in Dialogue. Knowing, Unknowing, Believing

This volume presents a theoretical and practical model for analysing epistemic stance in dialogues, i.e. the positions both epistemic (commitment) and evidential (source of information) which speakers take in the here and now of communication with regard to the information they are conveying and which they express through lexical and morphosyntactic means. According to the results of our studies of different types of corpora, these positions can be reduced to three basic ones: Knowing, Unknowing, Believing (KUB). In the first part of the book, we present the KUB model and its psychological and linguistic backgrounds. In the second part, we provide an exemplary application of the model, by presenting the qualitative and quantitative analysis of dialogues belonging to different genres and contexts. The volume is addressed to scholars concerned with the topical issues from a theoretical and analytical perspective.

Writers’ Uncertainty in a Corpus of Scientific Biomedical Articles with a Diachronic Perspective

The communication of the uncertainty of a scientific finding largely determines whether that information will be translated to practice. Unfortunately, our ability to study these phenomena is restricted since existing uncertainty corpora with a diachronic perspective are limited. We analysed a historical corpus through a random sample of 167 years (1840–2007) of articles published in the British Medical Journal. Randomization was stratified according to four distinct time periods. The Uncertainty Markers (UMs) and their linguistic scope were tagged in each full-text article in order to answer the following main questions: (1) which and how many lexical and morphosyntactic UMs are used by writers in order to communicate their own uncertainty? (2) How much uncertainty (UMs + their scope) is present in each article, in each period and in the whole corpus? (3) Is there any significant variation in the use of UMs and their scope along the 167-year span? Although the analysis revealed significant differences in two of the six categories of UMs (non-verbs and modal verbs in the conditional mood), the amount of certainty and uncertainty along the four periods revealed no significant variation. The manual identification was followed by an automatic detection, whose results showed that UMs and their scope were recognised with good accuracy.

“Oh” + Apology + Solution: A Practice for Managing the Concomitant Presence of a Possible Offense and a Problem-to-be-Solved

In this article we examine a turn construction (“oh”+apology+solution) that speakers use to deal with the concomitant presence of a possible offense and a problem-to-be-solved in the immediately preceding interactional environment. We show that speakers collaborate in differentiating the offense aspect and the problem aspect of an emerging circumstance by treating the apology component as preliminary to and in the service of the primary function of the turn: treating the circumstance as a problem-to-be-solved and providing a solution for it. The “oh” prefacing, which treats the circumstance as something of which the speaker had not been previously aware, and the turn-medial positioning of the apology contribute to treating the matter at hand as a minor shortcoming or imposition rather than a major wrongdoing.

Consigli per dare consigli: salvaguardare il benessere relazionale nelle interazioni informali d’aiuto

Lo studio presenta un’analisi dell’attivita del dare consigli all’interno di sequenze di troubles talk in lingua Italiana, focalizzandosi sul possibile impatto delle strategie di mitigazione e di negoziazione epistemica. I principali risultati del nostro studio mostrano che un consiglio successivo a una esplicita richiesta, anche quando non mitigato, e normalmente seguito da allineamento; al contrario, un consiglio non richiesto, anche se mitigato, e generalmente seguito da disallineamento. Tali risultati suggeriscono quanto sia importante per gli esiti conversazionali e il benessere relazionale la gestione e la negoziazione delle posizioni epistemiche tra gli interlocutori.

Dis-Identity as Living Identity

We present the concept of “dis-identity” as an intra-personal and inter-personal phenomenon of a person’s inner life and interpersonal relations. Disidentity manifests itself both in people’s inner monologues and in their dialogues with other people. Although the principal meaning of inner monologues is “discourses with one voice”, they do, in fact, reveal intrinsic polyphony and alterity, i.e. dialogicity between different voices, which come both from different parts of the same person and from other (imagined, internalized) persons. This dialogicity leads to the concept of disidentity and to its main forms: from a spatial perspective, we distinguish “inside” – disidentity from “inside vs. outside” – disidentity; from a temporal perspective, we distinguish diachronic from synchronic disidentity. Literature offers vivid examples of inner monologues in which disidentity emerges, one of these being Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Fraulein Else (1924). In order to explain the concept of disidentity we analyze some passages taken from this work.