Pragmatics - Volume 32, Issue 1, 2022

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.

This study presents a corpus-based sociopragmatic investigation into apology responses (ARs) and gender differences in ARs in spoken British English. Using data taken from the recently released Spoken BNC2014, the investigation leads to an adjusted taxonomy of ARs which comprises five categories and several sub-categories. The investigation shows that ‘Lack of response’ is the most typical response, followed by ‘Acceptance’, ‘Rejection’, ‘Evasion’, and ‘Acknowledgement’. The results are discussed in relation to the process of attenuation that apologies have undergone (e.g. Jucker 2019), i.e. apologies are becoming more routinised and less meaningful. The proposed taxonomy is subsequently used to examine the extent to which male and female recipients respond to apologies differently. While the investigation suggests no significant differences in ARs across genders, it has been observed that there is some correlation between ARs and the gender of the apologiser. Finally, the implications and applications of the study are briefly discussed.

Task-oriented video-mediated interaction takes place within a complex digital-social ecology which presents, to participants, a practical problem of social coordination: How to navigate, in mutually accountable ways, between interacting with the remote co-participants and scrutinizing one’s own screen –which suspends interaction–, for instance when searching for information on a search engine. Using conversation analysis for the examination of screen-recorded dyadic interactions, this study identifies a range of practices participants draw on to alert co-participants to incipient suspensions of talk. By accounting for such suspensions as being task-related through verbal alerts, typically in the form let me/let’s X, participants successfully ‘buy time’, which allows them to fully concentrate on their screen activity and thereby ensure the progression of task accomplishment. We discuss how these findings contribute to our understanding of the complex ecologies of technology-mediated interactions.

This paper offers an analysis of well-prefaced constructed dialogue as a stance-taking resource in written discourse on abortion. Drawing from four corpora collected from editorials, blogs, Twitter, and Reddit, I demonstrate that writers use the discourse marker well to indicate a stance of disalignment and convey negative attitudinal information when there is tension between the writer’s beliefs and those expressed in the constructed dialogue; the discourse marker allows the writer to position and align themself to construct a specific identity that reinforces a positive-self, negative-other evaluation.

This paper explores communing affiliation and out-grouping in a corpus of Trump’s tweets about Iran. Communing is a form of ‘ambient affiliation’ (Zappavigna 2011) which offers a way of understanding how Trump attempts to build alignments with his audience without necessarily directly engaging with them, since he tends to ignore replies to his tweets. The paper focuses on three affiliation strategies: convoking (mustering community), promoting (garnering attention), and finessing (dialogistic positioning). It draws on Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal framework to consider how these affiliation strategies are used to foster communing around ideation-attitude couplings, typically couplings associating Iran with negative judgement or appreciation. Promoting affiliation was found to be the most prominent affiliation strategy used by Trump to garner attention through his rhetorical tendency toward hyperbole.

Framing involves how language users conceptualize what is happening in interaction for situated interpretation of roles, purposes, expectations, and sequences of action, thus show significant conceptual relevance to the analysis of routinized institutional communication. Having established a working definition of framing based on an intensive review of previous research, this study investigates university students’ and tutors’ framing behaviors in interactive small group talk. Two types of framing-in-interaction, -alternate framing of a single situation and co-framing within/beyond speaker role boundary-, are identified, examined, and characterized from a conversation-analytic perspective. The findings suggest that alternate framings co-occur with traceable interactional devices for sequential organization when the single situation at talk takes on divergent meaning potentials to be accessed. Co-framings happen when at least one (group) of participants is highly goal-oriented, showing conditional relevance to the prior courses of action and more explicit negotiation of epistemic stances. Framing, therefore, can be arguably taken as a global organization resource to characterize contextualization in institutional communication.