English Text Construction - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2012

Ways of identifying subjectification and especially intersubjectification are discussed using data from the history of English no doubt and surely. These adverbs arose out of non-modal expressions and were recruited for use as epistemic adverbs and metadiscursive markers. The data are shown not to support the hypothesis that expressions at left periphery are likely to be subjective (oriented toward turn-taking and discourse coherence), those at right periphery intersubjective (oriented toward turn-giving or elicitation of response, and toward the Addressee’s stance and participation in the communicative situation.). While no doubt is subjective at both left and right periphery, surely is intersubjective at both peripheries

This paper discusses textual uses of modality and mood forms in English and Japanese and claims that they all represent a shift from subjective through intersubjective to the textual. As the shift towards textual function is difficult to define in terms of either subjectification or intersubjectification, it is suggested that shift towards the textual needs to be acknowledged as equal to the shift towards the subjective and the intersubjective. These three kinds of shifts are understood as together forming the larger tendency of change labeled as ‘speech-act orientation’. Furthermore, the cases discussed in this paper provide evidence for the fact that textual functions, which have often been conceived as an intermediate stage in change towards subjective and intersubjective elements, are in fact sometimes the endpoints of grammatical change, beyond subjective and intersubjective functions.

This paper compares a few notions of ‘subjectivity’ (vs. ‘objectivity’ or ‘intersubjectivity’) circulating in the current functional and cognitive linguistic literature. It aims to demonstrate that, in spite of some points of contact in the analysis of certain linguistic issues, e.g. in the sphere of the modal categories, these notions actually refer to substantially different phenomena and should therefore not be confused.

In this article, I take a discoursal perspective on intersubjectivity, exploring ways in which intersubjective meanings may be realized across texts, and the kinds of effects that arise from the combination of different forms. In particular, I focus on how writers may exploit intersubjective choices to enact interaction with their intended audience. I carry out an illustrative analysis on a small corpus of editorials from two British newspapers, one quality and one popular; and I demonstrate that there is clear connections between the readership of the two newspapers as described on their audience demographic webpages and the ways in which the editorial writers deploy the resources of interactant reference, mood and modality to construe different kinds of audience.

This article offers some background on notions related to intersubjectivity in applied linguistics, specifically as studied in EAP. The study takes a reflexive approach to metadiscourse, investigating audience orientation in three monologic academic genres: advanced student writing, published academic prose and spoken lectures. Specifically, audience orientation involving second person you is examined from the perspective of the discourse functions in which the word is involved. A randomly selected dataset of 150 examples from each of the three genres was coded for metadiscursive functions, applying Ädel’s (2010) taxonomy. The results showed that the distribution of discourse functions was similar in the three registers; however, the highest frequency of metadiscourse was found in the spoken lectures, not in the written modes.

In this paper we present our views on intersubjectivity and intersubjectification with reference to case studies on adjectives, hedges, tags, honorifics, etc. Building on Diessel’s notion of “joint attention” and Traugott’s approach to intersubjectivity, we propose a distinction between three types of intersubjectivity: attitudinal, responsive, and textual. We evaluate and propose formal recognition criteria to operationalize this essentially semantic typology, such as left versus right periphery and prosodic features. In addition, we address the issue of directionality between subjectification and intersubjectification. Rather than seeing subjectivity as a prerequisite for intersubjectivity, we argue that in our typology intersubjective meanings of constructions may diachronically precede subjective ones.