Volume 37, Issue 5 -

This paper analyzes how interlocutors express evidentiality (Chafe 1986), epistemic stance and epistemic status (Heritage 2012) in their moment-by-moment interactional moves (Goffman 1981) in order to set the grounds for the argumentative dialogue they have during a hybrid television news interview. The data were extracted from an episode of the Brazilian television show De Frente Com Gabi ‘Facing Gabi’, which featured a discussion on religion and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) rights, focusing on adoption. In looking at the progression of the epistemic devices used by the participants, the analysis takes into account not only the sources or domains of knowledge presented by them but also issues related to access and rights to this knowledge. The analysis of the data shows that the interaction in question does not meet the expectations of a news interview discourse, in which interlocutors usually perform their roles as questioners and answerers according to a set of pre-established institutional norms. With this in mind, this study highlights the importance of viewing institutional discourse as a dynamic type of interaction that can be adapted by interactants in order for them to meet both institutional and interactional goals.

This study offers an analysis of independent conditional clauses (ICCs) that are used with argumentative functions in spoken Dutch. ICCs are used as arguments when they serve to motivate the speaker’s implied standpoint regarding a preceding propositional content, termed the trigger. Two basic types of argumentative ICCs can be distinguished, which are termed “direct” and “indirect” arguments. Direct arguments express a contextually given premise on the basis of which a conclusion about the speaker’s standpoint regarding a preceding trigger can be drawn. Indirect arguments, by contrast, express a condition that – if it had held – would have warranted the conclusion, but its counterfactual interpretation resulting from hypothetical backshift signals that the speaker knows that this condition is not fulfilled, and hence that the implied standpoint regarding a trigger is not valid either. We argue that direct and indirect ICCs instantiate independent instances of epistemic non-predictive conditionals and hypothetical predictive conditionals (in the sense of Dancygier), respectively, and that they set up propositional-logic arguments of different classic forms, i.e. the modus ponendo ponens form (direct ICCs) and the denying the antecedent form (indirect ICCs). However, they do not explicitly express the conclusion of the argument, as they lack a main clause, but leave it to be inferred by the addressee.

Small group project work often requires students to meet outside of class. It is important that these meetings be efficacious, as the resulting projects typically figure into students’ grades. The challenge is that, unlike in more formal meetings, there is typically no designated institutional authority to manage their work together. In peer meetings students have equal participatory rights; thus, formulating understandings and managing conflict can be especially delicate matters to accomplish. In this single case analysis of a small group project meeting, we examine the shifting role of a document in resolving conflict that threatens the group’s work. The analysis shows how, over the course of the meeting, a personal document created during the meeting subsequently becomes oriented to by the participants as an official formulation of their decisions and an authoritative directive to complete their tasks. This shift in orientation to the document allows a way out of the conflict and the meeting to come to a successful conclusion. In addition to providing data on conflict resolution in meetings without an official leader, the finding on the changing role of a document adds to understandings of how actions are accomplished through the construction and manipulation of objects.

The article presents a theoretical framework for linguistic analysis of a text – Functional Communicative Grammar (FCG). Based on the assumption that any text is generated by the communicative intentions of the speaker, this approach focuses on the speaker’s time and space perspective in relation to the depicted situation, the plurality of subjects involved and the different statuses of these subjects within an utterance. The methodology allows the analyst to reveal the author’s tactics and strategy in the creation of a text and to point out the linguistic tools that help them achieve the desired effect on the reader. To demonstrate the framework’s potential, I perform a linguistic analysis of a short humoresque by Chekhov, using specific categories developed within FCG. Analyzing the semantics of predicative and non-predicative units, I generalize over the organization of the textual time, subject perspective and registers understood as communicative types of speech, and demonstrate how Chekhov creates the effect of deceived expectation at the linguistic level.