Epistemic Stance in English Conversation

Kärkkäinen, Elise

doi:10.1075/pbns.115

Cited by 444 publications

(74 citation statements)

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“…I analysed the pragmatics of the marker I think, agreeing mostly with previous research (SimonVandenbergen 1996(SimonVandenbergen , 1997(SimonVandenbergen , 1997b(SimonVandenbergen , 2001(SimonVandenbergen , 2008Simon-Vandenbergen and Aijmer 2007;Kärkkäinen, 2003;Holmes 1990;Fetzer 2008) on the fact that this phrase has a dual nature, ranging from the extremes of expressing tentativeness to certainty. As the latter meaning was found to prevail in this study of parliamentary discourse, this might be another proof of the prevailing presence of strong epistemic modality in parliament.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 73%

“…These results are corroborated by Fetzer (2008, 391), who states that in political discourse this phrase is used to intensify the epistemic certainty. The dual nature of this pragmatic marker ('deliberative' and 'tentative') has also been confirmed by Holmes (1990) and Kärkkäinen (2003). Thus, Holmes (1990, 187) finds that in some cases when I think is used, 'the speaker is in no doubt at all about the proposition she is asserting; she uses I think to add weight to the statement rather than to hedge its illocutionary force'.…”

Section: Strong Epistemic Verbsmentioning

confidence: 86%

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Strong epistemic modality in parliamentary discourse

Vuković¹

2014

Open Linguistics

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Sounding convincing in order to convince -this simple strategy seems to come in handy for politicians trying to win over the electorate. Strong epistemic modality, which allows politicians to express a great degree of commitment to the truth of the utterance, pervades political discourse in general and parliamentary discourse in particular. The aim of the paper is to examine the linguistic devices employed to express certainty and commitment, i.e. to study strong epistemic modality systematically in the UK parliamentary language. The examination is carried out on strong epistemic adverbs, verbs, nouns and adjectives both quantitatively and qualitatively, and some reflections regarding their use in the Labour and the opposition discourse are presented. The results point to a relatively strong presence of strong epistemic modality in parliamentary discourse and light is shed on the ways it is used in this type of discourse.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 73%

Section: Strong Epistemic Verbsmentioning

confidence: 86%

Strong epistemic modality in parliamentary discourse

Vuković¹

2014

Open Linguistics

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“…Chafe and Nichols 1986, Fox 2001, Ifantidou 2001, Kärkkäinen 2003, Palmer 1986, Sakita 2002, Willett 1988see Michael 2010). The close link between EV and EM is also hinted in Dendale and Tasmowski's (2002) statement, "[R]eferences to sources of information have been linked closely to attitudes about the epistemic status of information, because the linguistic markers encoding these two semantic domains are often the same."…”

Section: Conflationistsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evidentials and epistemic modals in a causal event structure

Kwon¹

2011

BLS

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“…Students of language use in interaction, on the other hand, who are largely concerned with evidential strategies rather than grammaticalized evidentials as such, have tended to favor collapsing evidentiality and epistemic modality into a single notional category, essentially on the grounds that whatever the semantic grounding of evidential strategies in informa-tion source meanings, the interactional purposes to which evidential strategies are put are epistemic in nature (e.g. Atkinson 1999, Ifantidou 2001, Fox 2001, Kärkkäinen 2003, Sakita 2002. There is no doubt, of course, that evidentials and evidential strategies are frequently associated cross-linguistically and cross-culturally with epistemic modal implicatures (see, e.g.…”

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confidence: 99%

Nanti self-quotation

Michael¹

2014

Benjamins Current Topics

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This chapter describes two quotation strategies employed by speakers of Nanti, one involving grammaticalized quotatives and another involving complement-taking verbs of saying, and examines the consequences of the pragmatic differences between these strategies for two key questions in the study of evidentiality: first, the importance of degree of grammaticalization in delimiting ‘evidentials’; and second, the importance of the analytical distinction between epistemic modal and ‘source of information’ evidential meanings. Nanti use of the two quotation strategies is specifically analyzed in the context of self-quotation practices in order to isolate specific aspects of their pragmatics. This analysis shows that the lexical quotative strategy expresses that the quoted party is not only the source of the content of the utterance, but is also an ‘illocutionary source’, who is committed to the interactional force of the utterance, while the grammaticalized quotative strategy does not indicate such a commitment. The functional difference between lexical and grammatical quotative strategies in Nanti is compared with differences between lexical and grammaticalized quotative and reportive strategies found in other languages, and the Nanti results are found to be consistent with cross-linguistic tendencies towards functional differentiation of lexical quotative and reportives, on the one hand, and their grammaticalized counterparts, on the other. These facts, it is argued, motivate a distinction on functional grounds between grammaticalized reportives and quotatives and their lexical counterparts, supporting the use of grammaticalization as a criterion for distinguishing evidentials proper from evidential strategies. The commitment-augmenting function of the lexical quotative construction in Nanti self-quotation is then examined in light of the commitment-diminishing function commonly attributed to quotatives and reportives (and also found in Nanti). It is argued that both types of commitment-modulating effects emerge as implicatures from the basic information and illocutionary source semantics of Nanti lexical quotatives, and from pragmatic reasoning based on whether the quoted party is first person or third person. The fact that both commitment-modulating functions of Nanti lexical quotatives are derived from semantics of lexical quotatives elements is argued to show that the distinction between information source and epistemic modal meanings, often taken to be a pivotal notional distinction in defining evidentiality as a grammatical category, is also essential to the proper analysis of the pragmatics of evidential strategies in discourse.

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Epistemic Stance in English Conversation

Cited by 444 publications

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Strong epistemic modality in parliamentary discourse

Strong epistemic modality in parliamentary discourse

Evidentials and epistemic modals in a causal event structure

Nanti self-quotation

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