Volume 26, Issue 6

This paper uses a text-driven approach to explore epistemological positioning (the expression of assessments concerning knowledge) in English newspapers. The notion of epistemological positioning (EP) often overlaps with evidentiality —the linguistic marking of the basis of speaker/writer knowledge. This is a relatively modern concept in linguistics and, compared to the amount of research it has attracted concerning other languages, it has been somewhat neglected in research focusing on English. Newspaper texts are a particularly good source for looking into EP and evidentiality, because the news story is a genre that is preoccupied with knowledge. The analysis shows that EP in English can be very complex, and that the distinction between attribution and averral (Sinclair 1988) needs to be taken into account when discussing it in naturally occurring texts (particularly in news texts). The resulting elements of EP that are identified for the English language offer a first glance at the possibilities to express EP in English, and open up future research on EP in different registers and text types.

This article analyses witnesses' expanded answers to yes/no questions during direct and cross examination. Among possible types of expansions, the analysis focuses on ‘narrative expansions’, i.e., on expansions that go beyond the framework of the question. In the trial context, witnesses' expansions serve as a defensive resource, by allowing the witness to create an additional interactional space that counterbalances the asymmetry in favor of legal professionals typical of trial interaction. The general aim of the article, which utilizes data taken from an Italian murder trial that took place in 1998, is to show how expansions accomplish this defensive task. The analysis focuses on the discursive devices witnesses adopt in order to accomplish their expansions after having produced the requested minimal answer: prosodic or verbal devices that can appear as associated or isolated. The analysis identifies two specific interactional functions of these expansions, that of further substantiating information provided in the first part of the answer, and that of contextualizing the information conveyed in the initial answer. Witnesses seem to make recourse to this tactic out of a desire to change or mitigate the version of facts conveyed by the questions.

In this paper I argue that stance in discourse is not the transparent linguistic packaging of ‘internal states’ of knowledge, but rather emerges from dialogic interaction between interlocutors. Thus, stance is more properly viewed from an intersubjective vantage point, rather than being regarded as primarily a subjective dimension of language. I begin by outlining patterns of epistemic stance marking within the speech of single speakers and show that these arise from the intersubjectivity between conversational co-participants. Then, I focus on stance taking as a joint activity between participants in story reception sequences and demonstrate that stances often emerge as a result of joint engagement in evaluative activity. Finally, I concentrate on how the particular linguistic resources used for stance taking fit into the intersubjective pattern by demonstrating syntactic, semantic, and prosodic resonances between contributions by different speakers.

Discussions of reported speech have increasingly attended to mode, both the mode of the utterance represented and the mode of delivery. In this article, we argue for a more expansive engagement with multimodality, a view already signaled in the theories of Goffman, Clark, Hanks, and Irvine. We first propose shifting the unit of analysis from linguistic or discourse representation to semiotic remediation practices , a notion that attends to the diverse ways that humans' and nonhumans' semiotic performances (historical and imagined) are re-represented and reused across modes, media, and chains of activity. We then turn to three examples—a family pretend game, a college composition course task, and a comedy skit—that illustrate how semiotic remediation operates in concretely situated and culturally mediated practices. We conclude by suggesting that this notion of semiotic remediation will assist a fuller understanding of reported speech as discourse practice, that dialogic views of reported speech may in turn contribute to explorations of multimodality, and that attention to semiotic remediation is central to understanding the work of communication and culture.

Metadiscourse is the term used for self-reflective linguistic expressions that refer to the evolving text, to the writer, and to the imagined readers of that text. It is based on a view of writing as social engagement and in academic contexts reveals the ways writers project themselves into their discourse to signal their attitudes and commitments to matters in the text and to their disciplinary communities. This paper examines the frequencies and pragmatic purposes of metadiscourse in the relatively neglected academic genre of the book review. On the basis of a corpus of 84 reviews from three contrasting disciplines and interviews with journal editors and reviewers, we describe the ways these writers use metadiscourse to offer a credible representation of themselves and their work in different fields. The analysis shows how metadiscourse use can be seen as pragmatic strategies through which writers shape their social purposes to the formal constraints of the genre and the preferred practices of their disciplines. It therefore suggests how this genre not only draws on readers' familiarity with disciplinary knowledge of the field, but also an interpretive framework that includes appropriate social interactions.

In this paper I analyze some of the texts used in the legal procedures of divorce in England and Wales. I examine the texts as instruments of institutional power and as potentially identity constructing for the divorcing spouses who use them. My analysis focuses on the representation in text of each divorcing spouse and of the relevant legal institutions; it also focuses on the actions taken by the legal institutions through the texts. I argue that the texts construct an adversarial relationship between the divorcing spouses, treat them unequally in terms of social entitlement, and give one spouse power over the other. One of the consequences may be the bolstering of a sense of institutional power in individual lives: another consequence may be an impact on the developing psychology, both individual and relational, of the spouses. I conclude the paper with some reflections on the potential of this type of research for contributing to social change.