Language and Dialogue - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2014

The present contrastive English-French case study examines interactions in which an unexpected factor triggers a verbal reaction of surprise, hence affecting a speaker’s level of certainty. We focus on why-would questions in English and their equivalents in French and analyse them from a pragmatic viewpoint. The dialogues under scrutiny, drawn from the American series Desperate Housewives, show that the epistemic stance of speakers engaged in verbal interaction is constantly negotiated and co-constructed as the exchange unfolds, and that the traditional binary opposition between certainty and uncertainty may not constitute an adequate theoretical model. A distinct epistemic stance is called for, i.e. modal remoteness. This stance does exist in both languages. And yet it does not relate to certainty and uncertainty in the same way in English and in French.

The paper further contributes to what Schegloff (2007) terms as “retro-sequences”. Different utterance formats such as utterances expansions by a second speaker, or questions regarding prior utterances, can be termed retrospective in a communicative sense. While previous research describes both utterance formats as syntactic and communicative opposites, this paper concentrates on their common ground, e.g. their common sequence organization. The paper demonstrates how interlocutors use the different utterance formats to display a degree of understanding with varying epistemic stance, and specifies the linguistic means for it.

In this article, we analyse the modal forms sans doute and sin duda. (lit. without doubts or undoubtedly). Despite their formal similarity, they do not always represent the same degree of certainty in French and Spanish. After a detailed analysis of their use in both languages, our conclusions show that sans doute is a probability marker, whereas sin duda is an (almost) certainty marker. After examining the relationship of these modal markers with evidentiality, we underscore the epistemic character of both markers; they are related to belief and subjectivity, thus the nature of certainty that they express is indirect and subjective. Sin duda manifests a higher degree of conviction than sans doute.

White House press briefings have the function of providing journalists with first-hand information on present activities of the US-American administration. The Press Secretary, currently Jay Carney, mainly draws on indirect reportative evidentialiy, referring to recent utterances by the President. However, owing to the often critical and persistent inquiries by investigative journalists based on counter-evidentiality, the Press Secretary frequently resorts to evasive manoeuvres. Moreover, he commonly refuses to use logical inferencing in his function as a mouthpiece of the government, since speculations might be potentially harmful when given to the press. Thus, the present paper investigates the possibilities and limitations of evidentiality in this interview genre from a discourse-analytical perspective on the basis of an online archive of transcripts.

Quoting constitutes a well documented evidential strategy across languages. This article examines an English collection of comments in online political discussion forums, which covers a wide spectrum of patterns with 1) overt stance-taking plus a direct quotation at one end and 2) implicit stance-taking without quotation at the other. The notions of deixis and accountability are used in order to explicate the evidential function of quotations in the practices of stance-taking observed: While pattern 1) achieves participants’ maximum accountability and entitlement to making their claims, pattern 2) is associated with minimum accountability and entitlement. The findings are discussed in light of knowledge management and epistemic authority.

This paper presents an analysis of the forms and functions that a normal conversational strategy like hedging can assume in an institutionalized form of discourse — in this case, the courtroom, and particularly, in a specific juridical text-type: the cross-examination of the victim-witness in a rape trial. The study aims to show principally how the defence attorney of the accused exploits the hedging strategies of the female victim-witness in order to discredit her testimony and thereby win the case for the defence. By so doing, the argumentation will make two theoretical points. The first point is disciplinary, in that it will demonstrate the powerful contribution of the language sciences to the identification and unveiling of social injustice. The second point is ideological, in that it will show how some areas of Anglo-American institutions continue to reflect a social tendency towards leniency in the face of violence against women.

The contexts of legal communication are characterized by the maximum strain between the spread of doubtfulness and the aspiration to certainty. The distance between the versions of events proposed by prosecution and defense is clear evidence of the sense-making dynamic that marks the human condition as “insecuritas”. The analysis of legal contexts allows us to capture the complex process of the discursive construction of (un)certainty, that interweaves references on both the epistemic and value axes typical of a specific sense-enunciative community. In the discursive sphere of the “court” institution, all the enunciative positionings enacted by those who incriminate, defend, testify, guarantee and judge, disclose the several ways to relate to (un)certainty of their textual worlds. As a consequence, the meaning of “evidentials” is overdetermined by specific rhetorical structures that set up a wide range of personal styles in the management of (un)certainty . The analysis of texts produced in a judicial debate aims to display the dialogical principle pertaining to a specific modulation of evidentiality expressed by deontic forms, performing a “dehumanizing” rhetoric. They can be interpreted as a trace of the opportunity to emphasize the ethical roots of each claim for certainty.

The paper presents some evidential and epistemic strategies that appear frequently in old and present-day Romanian parliamentary debates. By evidential and epistemic strategy we mean the manipulation of evidential and epistemic markers, either grammaticalized or pragmatic, in order to achieve various interactional and rhetorical aims. We have in view not only encoded evidential and epistemic meanings, but also (interactional) inferentially conveyed evidential and epistemic meanings. Modality can be manipulated in various ways: the usual ranking of evidentials can be reinterpreted for argumentative means: i.e., hearsay can be sometimes rejected, while, in other cases, it can be presented as more reliable than perceptual evidence.

The paper analyses the contribution of modal forms expressing certainty and uncertainty to the construal of a politician’s ethos. Deontic modals are considered implicit evidentials. The theoretical and methodological background of the analysis is provided by pragmatics and discourse analysis, as discourse is the main place where ethos is construed. The illustrative data are selected from a TV debate which took place in the last presidential election campaign in Romania (2009). The confrontation involved Traian Bǎsescu (TB), the President in office, running for a second term, and Crin Antonescu (CA), the president of the National Liberal Party. The differences in their strategic use of certainty and uncertainty marks define two types of ethos for the audience: an ethos of power (TB) vs. an ethos of a man of character (CA).