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.

This volume explores a model of epistemic stance, according to which speakers can communicate each single piece of information either as known/certain or uncertain or unknown. It presents a qualitative analysis of extracts from the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 to support the idea that questions come from two distinct epistemic positions: the Unknowing and the Uncertain; this latter ranges along two poles: Not Knowing Whether and Believing. In the epistemic continuum, Unknowing questions express a lack of knowledge and range from open to closed and dual wh-questions. On the other hand, Uncertain questions express a lack of certainty and range from maximum uncertainty (Not Knowing Whether-questions advancing a doubt) to minimum uncertainty (Believing-questions advancing a supposition). Both Unknowing and Uncertain questions can be directed either at the answerer’s Knowing or Believing position, depending on their aim. The volume will appeal to scholars concerned with the topic of question design and epistemic stance from a theoretical and analytical perspective, as well as those interested in applying these findings in their teaching practice.

Each time we take a turn in conversation we indicate what we know and what we think others know. However, knowledge is neither static nor absolute. It is shaped by those we interact with and governed by social norms - we monitor one another for whether we are fulfilling our rights and responsibilities with respect to knowledge, and for who has relatively more rights to assert knowledge over some state of affairs. This book brings together an international team of leading linguists, sociologists and anthropologists working across a range of European and Asian languages to document some of the ways in which speakers manage the moral domain of knowledge in conversation. The volume demonstrates that if we are to understand how speakers manage issues of agreement, affiliation and alignment - something clearly at the heart of human sociality - we must understand the social norms surrounding epistemic access, primacy and responsibilities.

This volume contributes to the burgeoning field of research on stance by offering a variety of studies based in natural discourse. These collected papers explore the situated, pragmatic, and interactional character of stancetaking, and present new models and conceptions of stance to spark future research. Central to the volume is the claim that stancetaking encompasses five general principles: it involves physical, attitudinal and/or moral positioning; it is a public action; it is inherently dialogic, interactional, and sequential; it indexes broader sociocultural contexts; and it is consequential to the interactants. Each paper explores one or more of these dimensions of stance from perspectives including interactional linguistics and conversation analysis, corpus linguistics, language description, discourse analysis, and sociocultural linguistics. Research languages include conversational American English, colloquial Indonesian, and Finnish. The understanding of stance that emerges is heterogeneous and variegated, and always intertwined with the pragmatic and social aspects of human conduct.

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.

Evidentiality Revisited focuses on semantic-pragmatic based frameworks for the study of evidentials and evidential strategies in European languages (Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Lithuanian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish). The book also presents discourse-pragmatic studies, with special emphasis on the use of evidential and epistemic expressions as resources for stancetaking in discourse. The volume addresses issues such as the relationship between the conceptual domains of evidentiality and epistemic modality, the role of evidential and epistemic resources in modelling stancetaking, the expression of speaker commitment to the validity status of the information, and the discourse-pragmatic variation of evidentiality and epistemic modality in discourse domains and genres. The volume offers a collection of contributions in which cross-linguistic studies and corpus-based studies contribute to provide further insights into a usage-based account of linguistic reality.

The first handbook to survey and expand the burgeoning field of corpus pragmatics, the intersection of pragmatics and corpus linguistics.