The Acquisition of Verbal Epistemic Stance Marking during Study Abroad: The Case of je pense in L2 French

Epistemic stance markers, such as je pense in French, take on a variety of discursive functions, ranging from asserting an opinion, indicating the source of information, and mitigating a claim, to pragmatic functions, such as gaining time for discourse planning. Previous research suggests that the epistemic marker je pense is mostly used in French conversation to express opinions and can be used as an indicator of the development of a learner’s assertiveness and pragmatic competence during a study abroad period. Using a functional approach, this paper seeks to find out the extent to which study abroad fosters the development of assertiveness and pragmalinguistic competence among L2 learners, through an analysis of stance marking in interview data from 26 Anglophone learners of French, who spent nine months abroad in a French-speaking country, and 10 French native speakers. The results show that learners are globally less assertive in their use of je pense than native speakers, particularly prior to departure, and that they develop pragmatic uses of je pense, thereby showing a development in their interactional strategies. Finally, the high inter-variability in the way learners used je pense suggests the importance of personal style.

Temperance and Epistemic Purity in Plato’s Phaedo

In this paper I examine the moral psychology of the Phaedo and argue that the philosophical life in this dialogue is a temperate life, and that temperance consists in exercising epistemic discernment by actively withdrawing assent from incorrect evaluations the body inclines us to make. Philosophers deal with bodily affections by taking a correct epistemic stance. Exercising temperance thus understood is a necessary condition both for developing and strengthening rational capacities, and for fixing accurate beliefs about value. The purification philosophers strive for, and the purifying role of philosophy, should then be understood as a clarificatory act consisting in making one’s thoughts clear and withdrawing assent from erroneous evaluative content in our desires and pleasures. Along the way, I argue that philosophers must neither avoid situations and activities that cause bodily affections as much as possible, nor ignore or care little about them.

The Grammar of Obviousness: The Palm-Up Gesture in Argument Sequences

This paper investigates the body’s role in grammar in argument sequences. Drawing from a database of public disputes on language use, we document the work of the palm-up gesture in action formation. Using conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, we show how this gesture is an interactional resource that indexes a particular epistemic stance—namely to cast the proposition being advanced as obvious. In this report, we focus on instances in which participants reach what we refer to as an ‘impasse’, at which point the palm up gesture becomes a resource for reasserting and pursuing a prior position, now laminated with an embodied claim of ‘obviousness’ that is grounded in the sequentiality of the interaction. As we show, the palm up gesture appears with and in response to a variety of syntactic and grammatical structures, and moreover can also function with no accompanying verbal utterance at all. This empirical observation challenges the assumption that a focus on grammar-in-interaction should begin with, or otherwise be examined in relation to, ‘standard’ verbal-only grammatical categories (e.g., imperative, declarative). We conclude by considering the gestural practice we focus on alongside verbal grammatical resources (specifically, particles) from typologically distinct languages, which we offer as a contribution to ongoing discussions regarding an embodied conceptualization of grammar—in this case, epistemicity.

Face and politeness in fandom in China

Face and politeness in fandom in the People's Republic of China are driven by a dominating focus on rank, which entails a prodigious amount of social media interaction, primarily occurring as posts and comments on the microblogging website Weibo. When interacting with their fellows in the same fandom, fans refer to a collective identity in order to maintain or enhance rapport with their interlocutors. Fan members use deliberately opaque and alien terminology for their in-group discussions, intertwining their fandom's discourse with that of their idols' fans and thereby intertwining notions of face. To further differentiate their fan base from other counterparts, thus reinforcing their collective identity as a distinctive community, fans use neologisms that are exclusive to their own fan space, thereby creating unconventional and discursive strategies of politeness similar to mock politeness. When preserving face, expressing politeness, and maintaining rapport with fellow fans, fans use carefully selected semantic strategies that act as epistemic stance markers. When interacting with idols, fans use self-referential terms that show politeness, giving face to idols and enhancing rapport between idols and fans.

Polar answers and epistemic stance in Greek conversation

This conversation analytic study examines the linguistic resources for indexing epistemic stance in second position in question sequences in Greek conversation. It targets three formats for providing affirming/confirming answers to polar questions: unmarked and marked positive response tokens, and repetitions. It is shown that the three formats display different functional distributions. Unmarked response tokens do ‘simple’ answering, marked response tokens provide overt confirmations, and repetitional answers assert the respondent’s epistemic authority besides confirming the question’s proposition. Unmarked and marked response tokens accept the questioner’s epistemic stance, whereas repetitional answers may accept or resist the epistemic terms of the question, depending on the action being implemented by the question. This study sheds light on the organization of questioning and answering in Greek conversation and the role of epistemics in the design of polar answers.

Stance in press releases versus business news: a lexical bundle approach

Press releases represent a hybrid business genre, which combines an informational and a promotional communicative purpose. The objective of the study is to assess the extent to which this duality is reflected in the language used, and more particularly in the expression of stance, by comparing corporate press releases with another business genre that is essentially informational, namely business news reporting. The focus is on lexical bundles, as they have been found to be a major conveyor of attitudinal and epistemic stance. Relying on the pattern-matching approach to language, 3-word lexical bundles are extracted from a 1-million-word corpus of press releases (BeRel) and set against those found in a similar-sized corpus of business news (BeNews). An examination of the key bundles (keyword analysis) in each corpus reveals that the bundles that are distinctive to press releases differ significantly from those found in BeNews, particularly in the expression of modal, evaluative and personal stance.