Kärkkäinen 2006 Stancetaking in conversation From subjectivity to intersubjectivity

Stance taking in conversation: From subjectivity to intersubjectivity ¨ RKKA ¨ INEN ELISE ELISE KA

Abstract In this paper I argue that stance in discourse is not the transparent linguistic packaging of ‘internal states’ of knowledge, but rather emerges from dialog dia logic ic interac interactio tion n betwee between n interlo interlocut cutors ors.. Thus, Thus, stance stance is more more proper properly ly viewed from an intersubjective vantage point, rather than being regarded as primarily a subjective dimension of language. I begin by outlining patterns of epistemic stance marking within the speech of single speakers and show that these arise from the intersubjectivity between conversational co participants. Then, I focus on stance taking as a joint activity between participants in story reception sequences and demonstrate that stances often emerge as a result of joint engagement in evaluative activity. Finally, I concentrate on how the particular linguistic resources used for stance taking fit into the intersubjective pattern by demonstrating syntactic, semantic, and prosodic resonances between contributions by di¤erent speakers. Keywords: Keywords:

1.

stance; stance; subje subjectivit ctivity; y; intersub intersubjecti jectivity; vity; I think; stance taking; resonance.

Intr Introd oduc ucti tion on

It has become widely accepted within linguistic anthropology and conversation analysis that meanings are co-constructed and social in nature. For example, in their seminal article Goodwin and Goodwin (1992) investigate gate the collab collaborat orative ive pro produc duction tion of assess assessmen ments ts (or the evalua evaluatio tion n of persons, events, objects, etc., being described in talk), during which ‘participants can calibrate their separate evaluations of events in their phenomenal world and intricately demonstrate how their minds are in tune with each other’ (Duranti and Goodwin 1992: 149, in their introduction to Goodwin and Goodwin). But within linguistics, even of the functional 1860–7330/06/0026–0699 Online 1860 – 7349 6 Walter Walter de Gruyter Gruyter

Text & Talk 26–6 (2006), pp. 699–731 DOI 10.1515/ TEXT.2006.029

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variety, there has until recently been a fairly resolute adherence to singlespeaker contributions as loci of meaning. Similarly, in linguistic studies on what has variously been termed modality, evaluation, attitude, a¤ect, subjectivity, or stance, the focus has been on utterances produced by single gle sp spea eake kers. rs. Many Many rece recent nt trea treatm tmen ents ts rega regard rd stan stance ce from from the the po poin intt of view of the individual speaker, i.e., as a static and isolated mental position tion or inte interio riorr stat statee of an ind indiv ivid idua uall sp spea eaker ker,, who who in expre express ssin ing g her her stance draws from a more or less definite set of (primarily) grammatical and lexical markers. However, However, in this paper I will show that stance is not only constructed constructed by grammatical or lexical means, but that the sequential occurrence of stance markers and the degree of syntactic, semantic, and /or prosodic parallelism or ‘resonance’ across speakers is also a resource for stance taking. 1 Relatedly, I argue that stance is not primarily situated within the minds of individual speakers, but rather emerges from dialogic interaction between interlocutors in particular dialogic and sequential contexts. Thus, stance is more properly viewed from an intersubjective vantage point, rather than being regarded as a primarily subjective dimension of language.

2.

Purp Purpo ose

‘Stance’ in linguistics, then, has been treated as predominantly a matter of the expression of internal psychological states of an individual speaker. Epistemic modality, or epistemic stance, has commonly been conceived of as manifesting some of the most apparently ‘subjective’ marking linguistic resources. Among such linguistic resources, I think can be seen as a sort of prototype of subjective language, because it contains reference to the speaker (the first-person pronoun) and a verb that denotes a private or interior interior cognitive cognitive process. Kockelman Kockelman ( personal personal communicatio communication), n), however, warns against automatically assuming that reference to the speaker’s ment mental al stat states es can can be take taken n as the the pr prot ototy otype pe of su subje bject ctiv ivit ity. y. His His po point int is well taken; I think in my data of spoken American English from a variety of intera interacti ctional onal settin settings gs often often app appear earss in sequent sequential ial contex contexts ts where where its referential meaning is quite vague and bleached (to the point of deletion of the first-person pronoun), and clearly acts as a discourse marker that that simp simply ly fram frames es an up upco comin ming g stan stance ce or mark markss bo boun unda dari ries es with within in a speaker’s speech (see also Notes 9 and 14). Nonetheless, I think continues to be considered prototypically subjective by many linguists (and English speakers), who consider it to introduce an internal, private mental state of the speaker. However, in this paper my emphasis is on how epistemic and other markers are used by speakers in actual interactions (and what other

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variety, there has until recently been a fairly resolute adherence to singlespeaker contributions as loci of meaning. Similarly, in linguistic studies on what has variously been termed modality, evaluation, attitude, a¤ect, subjectivity, or stance, the focus has been on utterances produced by single gle sp spea eake kers. rs. Many Many rece recent nt trea treatm tmen ents ts rega regard rd stan stance ce from from the the po poin intt of view of the individual speaker, i.e., as a static and isolated mental position tion or inte interio riorr stat statee of an ind indiv ivid idua uall sp spea eaker ker,, who who in expre express ssin ing g her her stance draws from a more or less definite set of (primarily) grammatical and lexical markers. However, However, in this paper I will show that stance is not only constructed constructed by grammatical or lexical means, but that the sequential occurrence of stance markers and the degree of syntactic, semantic, and /or prosodic parallelism or ‘resonance’ across speakers is also a resource for stance taking. 1 Relatedly, I argue that stance is not primarily situated within the minds of individual speakers, but rather emerges from dialogic interaction between interlocutors in particular dialogic and sequential contexts. Thus, stance is more properly viewed from an intersubjective vantage point, rather than being regarded as a primarily subjective dimension of language.

2.

Purp Purpo ose

‘Stance’ in linguistics, then, has been treated as predominantly a matter of the expression of internal psychological states of an individual speaker. Epistemic modality, or epistemic stance, has commonly been conceived of as manifesting some of the most apparently ‘subjective’ marking linguistic resources. Among such linguistic resources, I think can be seen as a sort of prototype of subjective language, because it contains reference to the speaker (the first-person pronoun) and a verb that denotes a private or interior interior cognitive cognitive process. Kockelman Kockelman ( personal personal communicatio communication), n), however, warns against automatically assuming that reference to the speaker’s ment mental al stat states es can can be take taken n as the the pr prot ototy otype pe of su subje bject ctiv ivit ity. y. His His po point int is well taken; I think in my data of spoken American English from a variety of intera interacti ctional onal settin settings gs often often app appear earss in sequent sequential ial contex contexts ts where where its referential meaning is quite vague and bleached (to the point of deletion of the first-person pronoun), and clearly acts as a discourse marker that that simp simply ly fram frames es an up upco comin ming g stan stance ce or mark markss bo boun unda dari ries es with within in a speaker’s speech (see also Notes 9 and 14). Nonetheless, I think continues to be considered prototypically subjective by many linguists (and English speakers), who consider it to introduce an internal, private mental state of the speaker. However, in this paper my emphasis is on how epistemic and other markers are used by speakers in actual interactions (and what other

Stance taking in conversation

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kinds of linguistic resources there are for stance taking in interaction), without assuming a priori a ‘subjective’ or stance function for any linguistic marker. On the basis of a close sequential analysis of function, it appears that we have to remain open to the possibility that a linguistic marker that looks highly subjective may actually not function to display a stance at all in many contexts of use. My data come from Part I of the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (SBCSAE; Du Bois et al. 2000), which consists of 14 conversations or 6 hours of digitized audio and transcriptions. My focus here here is on inform informal al everyd everyday ay conver conversat sation ion.. The data data corpus corpus was trantranscribed using the conventions in Du Bois et al. (1993; cf. Appendix). The data are transcribed into intonation units, or stretches of speech uttered under a single intonation contour, such that each line represents one intonation unit (Chafe 1979, 1987, 1994). To reiterate, my main aim in this paper is to show that stance is a public action that is shaped by the talk and stances of other participants in sequentially unfolding turns-at-talk. In what follows, I will begin (Section 3) by reviewing some recent linguistic work on subjectivity and stance, which has established some pervasive linguistic and discourse patterns in natural discourse data. In Section 4, I briefly present the findings of an earlier, primarily quantitative, discourse-functional study of the most frequen qu entt mani manife fest stat atio ions ns an and d pa patt tter erns ns of epis episte temic mic stan stance ce with within in sing single le speake speakers’ rs’ contri contribut bution ionss in natura naturally lly occurri occurring ng Americ American an English English data data ( Ka¨ rkka¨ inen 2003a). Then, in Section 5, using examples of I think I demonstra ons trate te that that the pervas pervasive ive patter patterns ns establ establishe ished d in the speech speech of sin single gle speakers can be understood to arise from interaction and the intersubjectivity between conversational coparticipants. In Section 6, I turn toward mappin mapping g out some some inters intersubje ubjecti ctive, ve, dia dialog logic ic practi practices ces of stance stance taking taking,, while also including instantiations of nonepistemic stance in the analysis. Finally, in Section 7, I return to the level of language and linguistic form, and show some of the particular linguistic resources deployed by English speakers speakers when they are invol involved ved in joint stance taking over longer converconversational sequences. 3.

Subjec Subjectiv tivity ity and and stan stance ce in lingui linguisti stics cs

Let us start with a (linguistic) definition of subjectivity, which comes from Finegan (1995). He claims that subjectivity is the . . . express expression ion of self self and the represent representati ation on of a speake speaker’s r’s (or, more generall generally, y, a locutio locutionar nary y agent’ agent’s) s) perspec perspectiv tivee or poi point nt of view view in discour discourse—what se—what has been been called a speaker’s imprint. (Finegan 1995: 1)

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Subjectivity, then, refers to the phenomenon that the speaker with her attitudes and beliefs is present in the utterances that she produces. In other words, rather than simply describing an event or presenting an objective statement of some event or state of a¤airs, the speaker represents an event or state of a¤airs from a particular perspective. When the speaker’s evaluative, a¤ective, and epistemic perspective is reflected in her actual language choices, we commonly talk about the expressive, emotive, a¤ective, or attitudinal function of language, as opposed to the referential, cognitive, or descriptive function. 2 The notion of subjectivity has generally not been a very precise one in linguistic investigation, despite the fact that it has been a topic of some interest for several decades, as evidenced by Traugott’s work on subjectivity from the diachronic perspective (1989, 1995, which shows that subjective meaning represents the last stage in semantic change) and Langacker’s approach to subjectivity within his theory of cognitive grammar (1985 and later). The description of the grammatical marking of evidentiality and epistemic modality as important manifestations of subjectivity have further been the object of intensive linguistic scrutiny for several decades in di¤erent languages of the world. 3 Other terms have also been used for the formal-notional domain of the speaker’s imprint and ‘subjective’ perspective, and of late, ‘stance’ is increasingly gaining ground as a (near) synonym for subjectivity. Kockelman (2004) proposes the following definition for stance markers: any signs that members of a community associate with a speaker’s personal contribution to event-construal, where ‘stances’ are to be understood as possible kinds of such personal contributions. This definition is not unlike our definition of subjectivity above, although, crucially, it brings in the speaker’s community and therefore takes into account the larger cultural and ideological dimension. In this paper, my focus is not so much on trying to give a hard and fast definition to this (formal, notional, and cultural) domain of language structure and use (I feel that it is premature at this stage, as I will explain below), but to look beyond a speaker-based and largely individual notion of stance (and subjectivity), toward the public nature of displaying stances and the activity of joint stance taking in discourse. There has recently been an upsurge in the interest shown by linguists in subjectivity, and it is coming to be seen as a major organizing principle in much of language use. Most linguistic studies to date have treated sub jectivity as a rather static category relating to the speaker; for example, Iwasaki (1993; cf. also Finegan 1995) in his treatment of subjectivity in Japanese examines the speaker as the center of deictic elements, the speaker as the center of evaluation, attitude, and a¤ect, and the speaker as the center of epistemological perspective (see also Langacker 1985


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and many others). In recent discourse-functional and linguistic anthropological studies, however, subjectivity (or a¤ect) has been shown to influence a wider range of aspects of language structure and use than has perhaps been thought (e.g., Ochs and Schie¤elin 1989; Hopper 1991; Iwasaki 1993; Finegan 1995; Dahl 2000; Bybee and Hopper 2001; Scheibman 2001, 2002). Research is beginning to show that not just grammatical categories such as deictic terms, mood, modality, tense, and evidentials are indices of the speaker’s point of view or attitude, but that our everyday language use is inherently subjective at many, if not most, levels. Indeed, Ochs and Schie¤elin (1989: 22) propose that a¤ect permeates the entire linguistic system, so that linguistic resources for expressing a¤ective and epistemic stance include, not only the lexicon, but grammatical and syntactic structures (e.g., choice of pronouns, determiners, verb voice, tense / aspect, sentential adverbs, hedges, cleft constructions, diminutives, augmentatives, quantifiers, word order, and so on), phonological features (intonation, voice quality, sound repetition, sound symbolism), and discourse structures (e.g., code-switching as instantiated by taboo words, dialect, couplets, and repetition of own /other’s utterances; Ochs 1992: 412; Ochs and Schie¤elin 1989: 12–14). In this vein, Biber et al. (1999: 859) also observe that conversation is characterized by a focus on interpersonal interaction and by the conveying of subjective information. And Bybee and Hopper (2001: 7) state that most utterances are evaluative in the sense of either expressing a judgment or presenting the world from the perspective of the self or of the interlocutor. The authors go as far as to suggest that natural discourse is ‘preeminently subjective’, concerned with the here-and-now world of the speaker and the hearer. In a corpus-based analysis, Thompson and Hopper (2001: 25) found that in American-English conversation the speakers do not talk much about events or actions, but rather display their identities, express feelings and attitudes, and check their views of the world with their community-mates. 4 Thus, even though subjectivity has been a notion relating primarily to the speaker, research is beginning to show that much of our everyday speech, based on speakers’ choices of linguistic forms (e.g., clause types, syntactic patterns, lexical choices), is centered around the speech-act participants: not only the speaker but also the hearer (see Section 7 below). Indeed, Scheibman (2001: 77, 79) points out that speakers situate their utterances in relation to other speech act participants, and she uses the term ‘interactive subjectivity’ to characterize this: for example, the second-person-singular utterances (e.g., you can use this for your mu‰ns. Scheibman 2001: 77) reflect an interactive or empathetic subjectivity because speakers frequently mediate direct assertions about other speech-act participants by modal elements ( can).5

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Acknowledging this recent body of research but going one step further, I will argue for a more dialogic, dynamic, and emergent view of stance in what follows—viewing it more as an intersubjective rather than subjective characteristic of language. 6 Here I draw on recent work by Du Bois (2000, 2002, 2004, forthcoming) who advocates the notion of stance as involving not only the subjective dimension, but also intersubjective engagement with other subjectivities: ‘without intersubjectivity, subjectivity is inarticulate, incoherent, unformed’ (Du Bois 2004).7 Hunston and Thompson (2000: 143) similarly point out that ‘the expression of attitude is not, as is often claimed, simply a personal matter—the speaker ‘‘commenting’’ on the world—but a truly interpersonal matter in that the basic reason for advancing an opinion is to elicit a response of solidarity from the addressee’. We do not express our evaluations, attitudes or a¤ective states in a vacuum; participants in discourse do not merely act, but interact. They achieve intersubjective understandings of the ongoing conversation as they display their own understanding (their subjectivities, if you like) in their sequentially next turns, while correcting or confirming those of their coparticipants (Heritage 1984; Nofsinger 1991; Hutchby and Woo‰tt 1998). It is a central claim in conversation analysis that participants update their intersubjective understandings on a turn-byturn basis, or, in other words, intersubjectivity is sequentially constructed (Heritage 1984). Displaying stances is part and parcel of the interaction between participants who respond to prior turns and design their talk for the current recipient(s). We therefore need contextual grounding in the dialogic and sequential context to arrive at a su‰ciently enriched interpretation of stance, as is convincingly argued by Du Bois (forthcoming). An analysis of stance must also appreciate the nature of turns-at-talk as emergent, incrementally achieved, and subject to local interactional contingencies (cf. Scheglo¤ 1996). It is also often the case that participants do not deal with the prior talk purely in its own terms, but rather they address it in the way it is relevant for their own subsequent purposes (Goodwin and Goodwin 1987: 4). As a result, participants may construct stances by building on but also modifying the immediately co-present stance of a dialogic partner (Du Bois 2000).

4.

Patterns of epistemicity in natural discourse

Epistemic modality or epistemic stance has been established in earlier linguistic research to be a semantically coherent formal, often highly grammaticized, domain (see, e.g., Lyons 1977; Perkins 1983; Palmer 1986; Coates 1990; Bybee et al. 1994; Biber et al. 1999). At the same time, it is


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considered one of the most frequent manifestations of subjectivity in language (Lyons 1977; Palmer 1986). By epistemic stance I mean marking the degree of commitment to what one is saying, or marking attitudes toward knowledge.8 This definition also includes evidential distinctions, or how knowledge was obtained and what kind of evidence the speaker provides for it (see also Chafe 1986 and Palmer 1986, who subsume evidentials under epistemic modality). 9 The expression of epistemic stance is pervasive in everyday spoken interaction; in fact, speakers mark epistemic stance more frequently than they mark attitudes or evaluations, or express personal feelings or emotions (Biber et al. 1999; Thompson 2002). Ochs (1992: 419–420), however, claims that both a¤ective and epistemic stances are central meaning components of social acts and social identities and have ‘an especially privileged role in the constitution of social life’. In Ka¨rkkaïnen (2003a), I established that epistemic stance marking is, besides frequent, also highly regular and routinized in terms of the linguistic forms used, as AmericanEnglish speakers tend to use a limited set of high-frequency markers in everyday speech, whether these then straightforwardly index a clear speaker stance or not.10 This finding is nicely corroborated by Precht’s work within the appraisal framework (Precht 2003: 240): her results also suggest that English speakers tend to use the same small set of stance markers repeatedly (something like 150 out of more than 1,400 di¤erent stanced words available in English). The most common type of epistemic marker in my American-English data was a cognitive verb with a firstperson subject (without the complementizer that after it). A paradigm example of this is I think , by far the most common marker in my data. As already mentioned above, this epistemic marker is commonly held by linguists to be prototypically subjective.11 Other frequent markers in the data studied were epistemic phrases (he or she said , I don’t know, I guess, I thought ), epistemic adverbs (maybe, probably, apparently, of course), and epistemic modal auxiliaries (would , must, might, could , will , may). Some recent studies have provided strong support for these findings. Thus, Biber et al. (1999) use a larger database but come up with the same patterns for American English regarding the relative frequency of epistemic markers, while Scheibman (2001, 2002) and Thompson (2002) note the same trends in smaller sets of conversational American English. Another consistent finding from my earlier study is that epistemic stance marking predominantly occurs initially, i.e., before the actual issue or question at hand (Ka¨rkkaïnen 2003a). 12 More specifically, epistemic stance markers as a class show great unity in the way they pattern in the data in view of a relevant unit of social interaction, namely the intonation unit: they are most frequently placed at the beginnings of intonation

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units. While some might be tempted to attribute such a pattern to cognitive processes (relating to the ease of information processing, a la Auer 1996 for example), 13 I aim to show that even this initial pattern of epistemic stance marking has roots in the interaction between conversational coparticipants.

5.

The emergent, contingent nature of displays of epistemic stance

In this section, I argue that epistemicity is a phenomenon that derives from the inherently dialogic nature of speech, that talk is always directed to a particular recipient or recipients within the sequential context of the turn-by-turn unfolding talk (Bakhtin 1981 [1953]; Voloshinov 1973 [1930]). In such a view, subjectivity is no longer regarded as a more or less static mental state of the speaker, but a dynamic concept constructed in the course of some action; i.e., subjectivity is an integral part of the interaction between conversational coparticipants. The data show various roles that one routinized stance marker, I think , plays in discourse, all of which are interactionally contingent. Among these are qualifying sensitive claims, dealing with minor interactional trouble spots, and showing heightened speaker commitment. It is worth pointing out that previous treatments of the interactional functions of I think have almost exclusively viewed this item within the framework of linguistic politeness; as a hedge on the illocutionary force of utterances and showing respect for the ‘negative face’ wants of the recipients, or the need of every adult speaker to retain freedom from imposition (Hu¨ bler 1983; Holmes 1984; Brown and Levinson 1987; Coates 1990; Ka¨rkkaïnen 1991; Nikula 1996; Aijmer 1997; Turnbull and Saxton 1997). While it is true that I think can be used for facework, this is by no means its only function in interaction, as I will show below (see also Notes 9 and 14). The following example of I think in intonation-unit-initial position illustrates the interactional motivation behind initial marking of epistemic stance. Rebecca, a lawyer, is preparing a female witness, Rickie, to appear in an upcoming trial. Here she is expressing her concern that some young single men on the jury panel may not be able to put themselves in the position of a victim. (1) SBCSAE 0008 Tell the Jury That <00:13:41> Rebecca (Re); Rickie (Ri) 1 Re: . . . (H) A¼nd, 2 especially, 3 . . I have some . . young single men,

Stance taking in conversation 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Ri: Re:

Ri: Re: Ri: Re:

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. . on my jury panel. [Mhm], [(H)] A¼nd, . . . % I% -. . my . . worry is that they don’t . . relate to what a woman feels, . . whe[n so]mething like that , [Mhm]. because their experience would be totally di¤erent. (H) if a man exposes [himself ], [(SNIFF)] which, . . a man would never do that. [Be]cause, [Mhm]. [2 (SNIFF)2 ] [2 (H) 2 ] number one they pick out, . . I think . . more vulnerable people. A> Mhm. ( H) But if, . . u¼m, . . . a ma¼n . . were to be exposed to, they would . . . laugh, . . or, . . you know, be disgusted,

Rebecca’s overall turn design is responsive to the contingencies arising from approaching a highly sensitive topic in the presence of an actual victim, Rickie, who generally only provides continuers but does not take a full speaking turn. This is reflected in Rebecca’s generally incremental turn design. While she is producing happening on line 9, she launches into o¤ering a reason why young men would not feel empathy: this word is uttered with a discovery intonation, i.e., it is faster and somewhat louder and higher in pitch than the turn-so-far, and her speech remains generally faster all through lines 11–20. The reason o¤ered in line 11, because their experience would be totally di¤erent ., strongly projects further explication of the reason, as the referent of their experience is not clear. Rebecca indeed goes on to clarify it, if a man exposes himself , but without actually providing the crucial information to a man (rather than a woman) before she retracts, which, a man would never do that . (this utterance in itself involving some hesitation and self-repair). This again requires

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further explication, which Rebecca produces in lines 19 and 20, that exhibitionists do not choose men as their victims in the first place but ‘more vulnerable people’ instead. We have good reason to suspect that Rebecca designs this utterance on the fly, to avoid bluntly referring to the fact that Rickie belongs to the category of vulnerable people (and therefore ended up as a victim), as that would constitute an evaluation of her. Rickie herself was in fact seen in the talk immediately preceding this segment to be quite vulnerable: she expressed extreme emotional anxiety over her experience, was very upset and cried, and can still be heard sni¿ing throughout this extract. While already producing the utterance, Rebecca then prefaces the potentially face-threatening evaluation vulnerable people by I think . There is some evidence that she redesigns the utterance here: the whole turn in lines 11–19 is said in fluent rapid speech, but in line 20 there are two micropauses (indicated by two sets of dots) both before and after I think , indicating some hesitation before the upcoming troublesome item. Such examples can be taken as evidence for what Goodwin (1979: 104) has claimed to be a pervasive feature of conversational interaction: ‘a speaker in natural conversation has the capacity to modify the emerging meaning of his sentence as he is producing it in accord with the characteristics of its current recipient.’ Marking epistemic stance before the issue at hand can then in itself be seen as interactionally contingent: as participants mark their subsequent talk as sensitive by displaying uncertainty, in this case I think modifying words, phrases or clause fragments, this prepares the recipients to align themselves to the upcoming contentious or evaluatively loaded message and to design their own subsequent turn-attalk accordingly. In Ka¨rkkaïnen (2003a), I demonstrated that instances of I think clearly arise from the contingencies of the immediate speaker–recipient interaction in certain recurrent sequence types: in second-pair parts of adjacency pairs (e.g., answers, second assessments and opinions, weak agreements), but also in more free-ranging sequential environments where participants are doing more strategic work, often dealing with issues of face. 14 Two further examples are presented here to illustrate this. In Example (2), in a conversation with his wife Jamie and two friends, Harold uses I think in a disaligning second assessment to introduce a di¤erent slant to why children’s bones heal quickly. The conversational topic of children’s bones was inspired by the specific case, discussed earlier in the recording, of Harold’s nephew, whose broken leg had healed very quickly. (2) SBCSAE 0002 Lambada <00:01:07> Pete (P); Harold (H); Jamie (J) 1 P: That’s like,

Stance taking in conversation 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

!

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. . that he was being hauled around in a little wagon [ 2 and stu¤ 2 ]. H: [2 Right2 ]. . . . [3 He ^healed very ` quickly3 ]. J: [3 kids’ ^bo¼nes, just like3 ] .. [4 grow4 ][5` back5 ] really ^fast (Hx). P: [4` M4 ] [5 hm=5 ]. H: [5 Yeah5 ]. they’re really ` soft to ^start with. J: They’re ` made of ^rubber. . . .
H: ` That’s why b-, . . little ^kids usually don’t break their legs ânyway.

In lines 5 and 6 of the extract, Jamie makes a first assessment that kids’ bones grow back really fast. Part of her utterance is overlapped by what Harold himself says in line 4 (apparently to Pete), yet Harold provides a positive acknowledgment before Jamie’s utterance has even come to completion (Yeah. in line 8). But he immediately produces a second assessment that introduces the ‘real’ state of a¤airs: I think they’re really soft to start with. After Jamie’s humorous upgraded acceptance of and agreement with this assessment, which is latched on almost immediately in line 10 and 11, Harold resumes his main line of argument, that children do not break their legs in the first place because their bones are so soft. It is possible to argue that I think simply expresses that the current speaker orients to the assessment o¤ered in the prior turn as not quite accurate and that he is about to bring in a slightly di¤erent take on it. The second assessment simultaneously projects more talk to account for this new perspective, which indeed follows in lines 12 and 13. The prosodic design of the turn contributes to the ‘more to come’ interpretation: Couper-Kuhlen and Selting (1996) argue that high onsets typically accompany topic initiations and thereby project a longer turn-at-talk. On the other hand, Ford (2002) discusses analogous turn trajectories or ‘turn construction formats’ like denial plus account/correction, where she o¤ers strong evidence that the second component is projected after the first. Finally, further support for the speaker orienting toward the first assessment as disputable can be obtained from Heritage and Raymond (2005). The authors claim that speakers who find themselves producing a responsive, rather than first, assessment often upgrade their (even similarly positive) assessment, by using various techniques like confirmation þ agreement token, oh-prefacing, tag questions, and negative interrogatives to ‘update their claimed epistemic access to, and /or rights to assess, a referent’

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(Heritage and Raymond 2005: 23). The authors further argue (2005: 16) that o¤ering a first assessment carries an implied claim that the speaker has primary epistemic or moral rights to evaluate some matter, and in using some of the above means, second speakers may wish to defeat the implication that their rights in the matter are secondary. Even though I think in Example (2) does not appear to be a technique used to actually usurp primary rights to assess (and is not one of the techniques discussed by Heritage and Raymond), it clearly displays that the status of the prior assessment is disputable, as also observed by Heritage and Raymond (2005: 33) of a particular example that they give. In the following excerpt of a conversation, where three senior citizens discuss their various ailments, Doris is doing more demanding interactional work. She shows heightened commitment when she produces several strong claims about herself as a pill taker, prefaced by several instances of I think . (3) SBCSAE 0011 This Retirement Bit <00:17:41> Doris (D); Ang (A); Sam (S) 1 D: . . (H) Then in the afternoo¼n, 2 take the capsule and one . . one Lazik. 3 A: Mhm. 4 D: (H) (Hx) (H) 5 S: . . She did [that yesterday]. 6 D: [I can’t do it]. 7 My stomach . . . gives me trouble, 8 . . . I cramp, 9 . . . (H) 10 A: (H) [Well what] -11 D: [X] (Hx) -12 A: . . . (H) Are are you % eating Tums, 13 . . . for [calcium]? 14 D: [No]. 15 . . [2 I’m not eating Tums. 16 A: [2 @@@@@2 ] 17 D: (H)2 ] I have- -18 . . . Oh I did take, 19 . . I did s- -20 . . . call out last night, 21 and say l-, 22 . . % make a note for potassium though. 23 A: (H) Do you have one of those little things that (H) has a compartment in it for [each day].

Stance taking in conversation 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 40

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[No]. . . . No. . . . Heaven sakes. . . @@@ . . . (H) not a very good ^pill taker, I’m re- -. . I ^think I’m [^resenting, [I’m not êither, but I have] -(H) ` I’m ^re]senting this [2 ^medicine2 ]. [2 (COUGH)2 ] And Î think it’s ` contributing to my ^problems. I ^really ^do. . . . (1) ( H) Î think that . . the . . ^cardazam ` is, . .Î think that the . . d- ^diarrhetic ` is, (H) % . . . (Hx)

From line 30 onwards, Doris produces two rather strong primary stresses in each utterance, her speech becomes distinctly faster and louder compared to her immediately preceding talk, and she rushes through what she has to say in lines 28–36 without pausing or yielding the floor (Angela tries in vain to break into the conversation in lines 31 and 32). In prior discourse especially one coparticipant has o¤ered premature advice: Angela’s questions on lines 12, 13, and 23 can be heard as giving advice on how to act in order to reduce the harmful e¤ects of the medicine and to make pill-taking a regular (and potentially thus less harmful) activity. Angela further o¤ers a display of a‰liation very likely to be followed by advice on lines 31 and 32, I’m not êither, but I have --, in e¤ect trying to interrupt Doris’s troubles-telling sequence (see Je¤erson and Lee 1981 for troubles talk). When Doris thus displays heightened commitment to her claim that she resents her medicine and that it is actually causing her problems, she is responding to the inappropriate alignment of the coparticipants. As these examples show, subjectivity, in this case stance taking through the epistemic item I think , is inherently interactively organized. Displays of subjectivity are engendered by the local contingencies of what happens between the coparticipants in prior or present talk, and stance displays conform to and manifest aspects of that interaction (of which recipient design is one). Thus, stance taking marked with I think is a dynamic interactive activity, an interactional practice engaged in by coparticipants in conversation, rather than a way of framing an isolated ‘thought’ or position of an individual speaker.

712 6.

Elise Ka¨ rkka¨ inen Stance taking as an interactive activity

In this section, we will broaden the scope of analysis from an individual speaker’s stance, toward stance taking as a joint interactive activity between conversational coparticipants. Instead of starting from preestablished and routinized linguistic manifestations of stance such as I think , the focus here is on the participants’ engagement and participation in evaluative activity in some recurrent sequential slots or environments in talk-in-interaction. Here my work has a‰nities to the work done by Du Bois (2000, 2004, forthcoming) on stance taking as a dialogic joint activity between conversational coparticipants, but my work is slightly more influenced by conversation analysis, notably its attention to close sequential analysis and temporality of interaction. I will show here that a stance only emerges as a result of joint engagement in evaluative activity. I propose that one such activity environment that frequently involves joint negotiation of stance is at points where conversational stories come to completion, i.e., in story reception sequences. This position is much like what Labov and Waletzky (1967) refer to as a ‘coda’ in conversational narrative. Within conversation analysis, Je¤erson (1978) discusses this environment as one where exit from the story is negotiated between teller and recipients, typically showing the teller’s orientation to what a recipient makes of the story, and recipients in turn displaying their appreciation. Scheglo¤ (1984: 44) also points out that there is a structural place for story recipients to display their appreciation of the story completion and their understanding of the story, and that these are often linked tasks. Some terminological points need to be clarified here. I use the terms ‘assessment’, ‘opinion’, ‘evaluative utterance/turn’, and the stance encoded therein somewhat interchangeably. But where assessments have been defined by Goodwin and Goodwin (1992: 155) as actions that are produced by single speakers (the same goes for ‘opinions’ and ‘evaluative utterances’), I seek to use the notion of ‘stance’ (which may be, but is not exclusively, manifested in assessments, opinions, or other types of evaluative turns) as an intersubjective notion rather than pertaining to single individuals.15 The focus in this section is precisely on stance taking as a sequential activity, rather than an individual action, or in the terminology of Goodwin and Goodwin, on ‘assessment activity’ rather than ‘assessment’. I will therefore include in the analysis any turn or action that forms part of the stance negotiations (e.g., a simple Yeah.), even though it may not include any overt or inherent displays of stance like evidentials or epistemic items, or any assessment tokens like evaluative adjectives or nouns.


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In what follows, I will illustrate, by way of two examples, what kind of interactional practices are at play when participants negotiate a shared stance toward aspects of the prior discourse, typically some protagonist(s) in a conversational story. Generally, the coparticipants do join in and indicate their agreement and alignment with each other, in addition to varying degrees of disagreement and nonalignment. In the following example, two cousins are talking about a relative, Lisabeth. Alina has just told Lenore about Lisabeth’s recent encounter with Alina’s mother, during which Lisabeth had complained that Alina’s mother now has a whole new life since she became a widow and does not seem to need her any more. The italicized items in Examples (4) and (5) are instances of epistemic stance. (4) SBCSAE 0006 Cuz <00:04:45> Alina (A); Lenore (L) 1 A: Mom said I do. 2 . . @@@ @ @ 3 (H) . 7 L: [3 (H)3 ] 8 A: [4 Mom’s go-4 ] -9 L: [4`Maybe she’s just4 ] kind of ^dense. ` Hunh. 10 11 A: (H) . . ` Well, 12 . . she ` wants everything on her [^terms]. 13 L: [(H)] 14 A: [2 You ` know2 ]. 15 L: [2` Is she ` vicious or ^dense2 ]. 16 A: . . ` She’s a . 17 (H) 18 L: @[@@]@ 19 A: [So], 20 L: @ <@ ` Explains that @>. 21 [@@@@] 22 A: [@@@ <@ ` Exactly @>. 23 (H) So], 24 t- Mom said, 25 you know, 26 % she goes, 27 when can I see you. !

! !

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Alina has established a clear negative stance toward Lisabeth during the telling, portraying Lisabeth as the primary person responsible for the lack of communication between her and Alina’s mother: she never calls her. The mother’s rather unsympathetic reply to Lisabeth on line 1, reported by Alina with a ‘curt’ prosody and clear falling intonation, and Alina’s subsequent malicious and very loud laughter can be interpreted by Lenore to invite evaluation and appreciation of the story. Lenore indeed projects that the story is now being brought to possible completion and produces an assessment of the protagonist, Poor Lisabeth. Maybe she’s just kind of dense. Hunh. She also happens to start the assessment simultaneously while Alina still continues to talk and to act out Lisabeth’s imaginary reply to the mother (lines 3, 5, and 6), which makes it apparent that Lenore’s projection of closure misfired. Lenore displays some uncertainty (maybe, kind of , hunh,), however, as to whether this is the right kind of conclusion to draw (that Lisabeth just does not ‘get it’ that Alina’s mother can do without her support). She also produces a conventional token of sympathy toward the protagonist, poor Lisabeth. In all, the way this turn is designed can be heard as the story recipient siding with a protagonist that was just presented in a negative light (cf. Scheglo¤ 1984: 47), the other protagonist being, if not the teller herself, very close to her, namely Alina’s mother. Yet, even though Alina is not done with the story, she joins in the assessment activity: she momentarily stops the telling to engage in joint evaluation of the assessed protagonist (this is then in e¤ect not simply a case of the recipient producing an understanding upon story completion that is unacceptable for the teller, cf. Scheglo¤ 1984: 45). That Alina interrupts her story and o¤ers a second assessment or opinion . . Well, . . she wants everything on her terms. You know. is of course also made particularly relevant by the design of Lenore’s first assessment, which ends in an interrogative tag Hunh. (cf. Pomerantz 1984: 61). Now, as the negative stance toward the protagonist that Alina has incorporated into the story was not received with an unequivocal and equally negative appreciation by Lenore (who had shown some sympathy toward Lisabeth), Alina’s subsequent evaluation is not in full agreement with Lenore’s assessment. Alina starts with Well , a potential disagreement preface (cf. Pomerantz 1984, even though well may here also mark the fact that Alina was interrupted in her storytelling), and produces an assessment with rather high contrastive stress on ^ terms, that now portrays Lisabeth as a domineering, rather than stupid, person. It is possible that the significance of this turn is not immediately obvious to Lenore (cf. Scheglo¤ 1984 on ambiguity), who in turn confronts Alina by asking: Is she vicious or dense. We may argue that being simply ‘dense’ is perhaps


715

socially more acceptable than being ‘vicious’ in the sense of domineering, and it is therefore rather important to establish which of the two Alina thinks applies to Lisabeth. Another interpretation is that Lenore thereby pursues her original assessment of Lisabeth (as kind of dense, lines 9 and 10) and again sides with the wrong protagonist. Alina’s subsequent turn, She’s a dope., does not really choose either one of Lenore’s assessment signals as such. As it is roughly synonymous with dense, however, Alina can be seen to align with and even escalate the stance in Lenore’s initial assessment on lines 9 and 10. But she di¤erentiates her stance rather precisely by choosing a third assessment signal instead of one o¤ered by Lenore. Her pitch also falls markedly on ^ dope. These choices appear to be doing something in addition to simply o¤ering an answer: they indicate that Alina wishes to resume the telling of the story (notice So, on line 19). We may argue that Lenore interprets the curtness of Alina’s turn as signaling that she wishes to continue: Lenore indeed laughs and makes a metacomment, Explains that, which indicates that she, too, is ready to move on. Even this turn design still gets a symmetrical ‘matching’ contribution from Alina: laughter followed by Exactly. These turns achieve a shared stance, a working consensus of the characteristics of Lisabeth, and the assessment sequence is brought to a close. Alina can now continue her story starting at line 23 with a conjunction so. What becomes clear from the example above is that involving one’s coparticipant in assessment activity is interactively important, and that coparticipants do indeed join in, even at points where storytellers have not yet completed their story. Thus, it is not so much that once a conversational story is told, with a more or less clear stance becoming obvious in its course, that the recipients are able to o¤er the ‘right’ kind of understanding or appreciation of the story; they may display uncertainty about its import or upshot, and try to involve the storyteller in the assessment activity. On the other hand, the storytellers themselves may attempt to guide the interpretation of their story, and may not simply let the recipient’s initial assessment pass. This example also demonstrates the importance of establishing a provisional consensus regarding the kind of stance that is being jointly constructed (e.g., Lenore’s question Is she vicious or dense and Lenore’s reply She’s a dope). In other words, participants display an orientation toward reaching a common understanding and a shared stance (for the actual linguistic design of such turns, see Section 7). And finally, such activities are usually brought to some sort of completion before relevant next actions can follow (even though speakers may occasionally abandon their stances for lack of recipient uptake). The next example shows some similar stance negotiation patterns. Sharon has recently been hired as a teacher in a bilingual (Spanish–

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English) classroom in Houston. She has just told Carolyn and Kathy, her sisters, about her generally very negative experiences: despite frequent attempts, she has been unsuccessful in securing a free lunch ticket for one of her pupils, because the school bureaucracy prevents her from finding out whether the girl’s application form has been filed in the first place. The story is another example of troubles talk, and in answer to yet another piece of advice o¤ered by Kathy before the example segment starts (. . You gotta go in and talk to the principal about this.), Sharon finally presents the situation as a case of ‘raging bureaucracy’ that she has no way of tackling. (5) SBCSAE 0004 Raging Bureaucracy <00:07:52> Sharon (S); Kathy (K); Carolyn (C); Environment (E) 1 S: What kind of fucking @law [ 2 is tha¼t2 ]. 2 K: [2 @@@@@@2 ] 3 S: (H) that you’re gonna tell me ¼, 4 that, 5 you know, 6 this kid [might have] to wait, 7 C: [(H)] 8 S: another month and a half, 9 to e- have any lunch, 10 (H) Because you can’t access, 11 . . you know, 12 . . her fo¼rm? 13 C: . . . (TSK) 14 S:
15 C: [(H) They’re just ` giving-16 K: [Unbelievable]. I `think ], 17 C: 18 it `sounds, like, 19 to `me, 20 21 they’re ` giving you a lot of ^sh ¼it for no ^@reason. 22 S: (H) . . ` Well they ^really are ^picking on the ` fact that I’m ^new, 23 like, 24 . . y- -25 uh, 26 [It’s really ânnoying]. 27 C: [The ` fact that you’re ^new], ` uh¼, 28 ! ! ! ! ! ! !

Stance taking in conversation 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

717

. . ` uh¼, S: [That I] -C: [` I would], . . ` I would go ^further than ` that. ` I’m not ^certified. S: . . ` And, >E: ((SIREN_STOPS)) C: ^Yeah, [@@] S: [it’s like], the [2 teachers¼2 ], C: [2 an¼d2 ], S: Coop this last week, C: , S: (H) First they’re like, . . first I only had fifteen kids. right?

Throughout the story, Sharon had presented herself as a rather active agent. Carolyn makes a concluding assessment on lines 15–21: They’re just giving-- I think, it sounds, like, to me, they’re giving you a lot of sh¼it for no @reason., thereby presenting her sister somewhat as a victim of some unwarranted acts of ill will on the part of the school personnel. However, her laugh token on @reason can be interpreted in di¤erent ways: it can be heard as projecting that there is more to it and that Carolyn probably has a certain reason in mind, but possibly also that she does not have a clear idea or that she is unwilling to suggest at this point the reason, or that she is a little embarrassed by her formulation (which in effect excludes all reasons). Sharon then o¤ers a second less than fully a‰liating assessment: according to her these are not unprovoked acts but can be accounted for by the fact that she is a new teacher at the school. In line 27, Carolyn in turn disa‰liates with Sharon’s assessment by repeating what to her is the problematic part in it, The fact that you’re new, and by adding two distinctive uh tokens, which strongly project that she is not going to accept being new as an adequate reason and that some third accounting factor will follow. But she only ends up hinting at what it could be by saying I would go further than that , which again strongly projects elaboration. Sharon herself is thereby prompted to immediately o¤er ‘the real reason’: I’m not certified . Carolyn accepts this with an emphatic ^Yeah, and some laughter (lines 36 and 37). In line 41, Sharon then continues to further relate her negative experiences at the school, now specifically to Kathy or Coop (her nickname),

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while Carolyn can be heard to say and, . The full significance of this truncated utterance cannot be deciphered with certainty, but one interpretation is that Carolyn was going to convey that it is indeed not possible for a noncertified teacher to take an aggressive role in the face of an injustice. In all, Carolyn has now led Sharon to the heart of the matter, to recognize that the problem lies not in being a new teacher but a noncertified one, and therefore in a situation with less power over her working conditions. Crucially, the two coparticipants have reached a mutual stance toward this issue. It is significant that the two participants jointly formulated the conclusion that the underlying reason for Sharon’s maltreatment is the fact that she is not a qualified teacher. This had not emerged from Sharon’s earlier troubles-telling story in any way, nor was it explicit in Carolyn’s first assessment in lines 15–21. Rather it emerged in the course of the joint stance-taking sequence that the participants were engaged in. Story reception is thus not a straightforward and simple issue for participants, but they may work out together an understanding of the gist or upshot of the story (for conversational storytelling as a collaborative and interactive activity, see Lerner 1992 and Mandelbaum 1993; for a case where the problematic stance taken by a story recipient leads to story expansions, see Ford 2004). As we saw in the examples in this section, stance is very often established and negotiated as an interactional practice. The articulation and di¤erentiation of stance is a joint activity between discourse participants, i.e., it essentially involves the recipients’ coparticipation. Assessments are one type of action that involve taking up positions and making evaluations, and they indeed often come, not only in pairs, but in longer strings, with each speaker constructing a stance by building on, modifying, and aligning or disaligning with the immediately co-present stance of a dialogic partner (see Du Bois 2000).

7.

Linguistic practices of stance taking

When we start our analysis by looking at the actions and interactions that participants are engaged in doing, rather than by identifying preestablished linguistic forms allegedly displaying subjectivity, we become aware of linguistic resources over and above the lexicon, grammar, linear syntax, or even discourse. In this section, finally, I will highlight some of the linguistic practices that participants in interaction resort to when jointly taking positions and negotiating stances. I will present two stance negotiations from the examples above in diagrammatic form, by mapping the relevant intonation units produced by

Stance taking in conversation C:

They

’re

they

’re

they

^really are

719

just ` giving--

I ` think, it ` sounds, like, to ` me,

S: ` Well C:

S:

Ì Ì

Initial framing of stance before assessment: I think , it sounds, like, to me, well Figure 1.

would ’m

` giving you a for no ^@reason. lot of ^sh¼it ^picking on the ` fact that I’m ^new, The ` fact that you’re ^new, go ^further than ` that, not ^certified.

Syntactic resonance: Semantic resonance: parallel syntactic structure: – synonymous predicate – subject pronoun, verb tenses verbs ( give a lot of – intensifiers (a lot of , really) shit & pick on) – extracting and repeating Prosodic resonance: object from prior turn – e.g., stress, intonationunit-final intonation

Diagraph of Example (5) ‘Raging Bureaucracy’

di¤erent speakers onto each other (roughly) according to syntactic structure (see diagraphs within the theory of dialogic syntax outlined in Du Bois 2001 and forthcoming). Such a representation makes visible the pervasiveness of (at least) two frequent dialogic practices of stance taking. The first of these is the initial framing of stance in individual speakers’ contributions, which was already discussed above in connection with I think . The second is not a discrete lexical item or syntactic device, but rather the high degree of parallelism at various levels of linguistic structure across speakers and speaking turns, in other words the resonance of syntactic structures, semantic meanings, and prosodic devices used.16 ‘Resonance’ has been defined by Du Bois (2003) as the activation of potential a‰nity across utterances, between comparable linguistic elements at any level. A diagraph puts into focus not only the initial framing of the relevant conversational turns, but also the parallelism and resonance across different turns by di¤erent speakers. As can be seen in Figure 1, epistemic stance markers tend to occur initially, i.e., before the actual issue or question at hand, which is expressed later in the turn. For example, Carolyn ends up aligning several epistemic markers as separate intonation units, I think , it sounds, like, and to me, and the actual assessment is pushed until later in the turn. Their abundance and separate encoding (that they

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appear as multiple as opposed to a single long intonation unit together with the actual proposition) stems from the self-repair that Carolyn is engaged in, because she initially overlapped with Kathy (on line 16 in Example [5]). As we saw in Section 4 on patterns of epistemicity in natural discourse, it is much more usual for epistemic stance markers to pattern intonation-unit-initially (Ka¨rkkaïnen 2003a). We also saw in Section 5 that initial framing in itself can be seen as interactionally motivated: establishing stance before the upcoming utterance helps recipients to align themselves to what is coming. The emphasis in much linguistic research has been on these initial and more recognized stance markers, but, as this diagraph illustrates, there is a lot of regularity to be observed in the patterns of stance taking beyond that. Notably, as Du Bois (2000) has observed, in conversational interaction one speaker often constructs a stance based partly on the immediately co-present stance of a coparticipant. Words and structures and other linguistic resources invoked by the first speaker are reused by the second, whether the second speaker’s stance is parallel, opposed, or simply orthogonal to the first’s. (Du Bois 2000: 3)

Such ‘recycling’ across speakers and turns may result in considerable structural parallelism in language as manifested in the repetition of words, phrases, syntactic structures, or prosodic patterns (Du Bois 2001; cf. also Tannen 1987, 1989; Anward 2004). Specifically, we can see this in the diagraph of Example (5): even though in their first turns Carolyn and Sharon take slightly di¤erent positions and focus on slightly di¤erent issues (i.e., being harassed for no apparent reason versus for being a new teacher), their utterances resonate both syntactically and lexically. The clauses they are giving you a lot of shit and they really are picking on X have parallel syntactic structure: they have identical and co-referential subject pronouns, the verbs are in the present-perfect tense, and both predicates contain an intensifier. 17 The two utterances also resonate semantically, as the predicates are synonymous. The di¤erentiation of stances comes at the level of the adverbial clause, for no reason, versus object of the verb, the fact that I’m new. What is more, Carolyn’s second disaligning turn is directly built on the structure and meaning conveyed in Sharon’s previous turn, by extracting a syntactic segment, the object The fact that you’re new, out of it. Anward observes of this phenomenon, where the recycled element occupies the rheme position in an utterance (as it does in Sharon’s turn): Repeating or retaining another participant’s rheme, in contrast to doing a variation on it, may thus indicate not only continuity of a contribution but also trouble of some sort. (Anward 2004: 37)


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Anward (2004: 34) further notes that there are particular combinations of recycled elements, notably combinations of contour, stance markers, and response items, that ‘are used to negotiate stance and establish intersub jectivity’, a statement that lends strong support to the claim made in Sections 6 and 7 of the present paper. Another pattern in naturally occurring discourse, which we saw in all of the examples, is the tendency for speakers to use first-person statements. Carolyn’s choice to make a first-person statement ( I would go further than that., projecting elaboration) instead of a second-person one (e.g., saying directly You’re not certified .) enables Sharon herself to actually produce the real reason, which she indeed does by similarly using a first-person statement (I’m not certified .). Bybee and Hopper’s (2001: 7) claim that most utterances in natural conversation express a judgment or present the world from the perspective of the speaker or of the interlocutor has been substantiated in several studies. For instance, Thompson and Hopper (2001: 37) found that the favored (in terms of frequency) grammatical constructions in conversational English are in fact intransitive verbal clauses ( I forgot ); copular clauses (it was confidential ); and epistemic/evidential clauses (I don’t think it’s workable). Scheibman (2001: 86) also uses American-English discourse corpora to show that the most common constructions in conversation are ‘those subject– predicate combinations that permit speakers to personalize their contributions, index attitude and situation, evaluate, and negotiate empathetically with other participants’. In the light of such findings, then, such high-frequency material is very likely to resonate across speakers as well. We can also use Example (5) to make some tentative observations of the prosodic features that resonate across speakers. The two noun phrases the `fact that I’m ^new , and The `fact that you’re ^new , are produced almost identically in terms of stress and final intonation contour (continuing intonation). The same goes for the next two utterances or the I -statements in Ì would go ^further than `that . and Ì’m not ^certified . The diagraph of Example (4) further illustrates the syntactic, semantic, and prosodic resonance between speakers, as well as the tendency to place stance markers initially in utterances (see Figure 2). In this diagraph we again see repetition across speakers of a syntactic frame, in this case she is X or is she X . Also dense and dope are semantically parallel and resonate, even though, as we saw above, the very choice of a dope instead of dense by Alina has the e¤ect of di¤erentiating her stance from Lenore’s. While it could be argued that such di¤erentiation is a display of the storyteller’s claim to primary rights to assess (cf. Heritage and Raymond 2005), it is nevertheless a striking instance of ‘recycling with di¤era´ nce’ (Anward 2004), i.e., of a more general pattern of

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L: ` Maybe A: ` Well

she she

L: ` is A: L: A: <@ ` Exactly @>.

she ` She

`s ` wants

just

`s <@ Explains

kind of

^dense. everything on her own ^terms. ` vicious or ^dense. a ^dope. ` that @>.

Initial framing Syntactic resonance: Semantic resonance: of stance: – parallel syntactic frame – dense & dope – parallel verb tenses Prosodic resonance: maybe, well – e.g., stress, intonation-unit-final intonation – phonological recycling and sound similarities (dense & dope, explains that & exactly) Figure 2.

Diagraph of Example (4) ‘Cuz’

the participants performing varied operations in especially rhematic recycling to create a di¤erence to the prior contribution and its rheme: one example mentioned by Anward (2004: 44) is finding a semantically related expression for an expression used so far. What is also striking in the example above is the degree of phonological recycling and sound similarities involved in the choice of lexical items: dense and dope are not just similar semantically, but they also show alliteration and contain the same number of syllables (even though they represent di¤erent parts of speech); the same holds for Explains that and Exactly.18 In addition, we have seen that laughter as a nonverbal device is used almost symmetrically by the two speakers here. These nonverbal and prosodic cues may be argued to actually contribute toward a convergent stance between speakers, as opposed to the di¤erentiation of stances brought about by their choice of di¤erent lexical items ( dense and dope; see also Szczepek 2001 for types of prosodic orientation or how one speaker responds prosodically to another speaker’s prosody). By o¤ering these preliminary observations about similarities in forms and meanings across dialogic turns, I do not mean to suggest that resonance and parallelism are a necessary feature of stance-taking sequences specifically. Stance-taking sequences are simply one frequent environment where such resonances are readily observable, and therefore worthy of our serious attention. Nor do I wish to indicate that resonating structures only construct agreement and a‰liation; on the contrary, as we saw above, some fine-tuned di¤erentiation of stances can be achieved by means of nearly parallel and resonating structures. As Tannen (1987:


723

599) puts it, ‘the metamessage of involvement communicated by repetition can gainsay a message of disagreement communicated by the words spoken’, and, on the other hand, meanings may disagree even if the words spoken are identical. In all, this kind of work is still in its infancy; nonetheless, I hope to have pointed out the utility of resonance as a new site for investigations of stance taking in conversation.

8.

Conclusion

In this paper, I first outlined some patterns of epistemic stance marking within the speech of single speakers and showed that these arise from the intersubjectivity between conversational coparticipants. Even though it has not been customary in linguistic research to view subjectivity as an interactional notion (in large part because of the long-standing focus on single-speaker’s contributions, the term ‘subjectivity’ of course reflecting this bias), it is clearly necessary to regard it as such. I argue that it is preferable to delimit the term ‘subjectivity’ to refer to a formal (i.e., lexically, phonologically, morphologically, or syntactically marked) quality that has to do with the speaker’s personal contribution, and which is perhaps most useful for capturing the referential meanings of the relevant linguistic resources. When our focus of inquiry is the description of the interactional functions of linguistic resources for displaying subjectivity (as I believe it should be), with less emphasis on the degree of subjectivity that they express, we are bound to find that what appear to us as subjective elements of language emerge first and foremost intersubjectively. In this sense, intersubjectivity as discussed in this paper is a quality inherent to the interactional process of stance taking (as an instance of interaction), regardless of the formal characteristics of the linguistic resources used. It is not advisable to limit our scrutiny only to what have been recognized as subjective elements in language, because these often reflect the analyst’s cultural and linguistic bias, and furthermore, as I have shown, other less discrete factors may clearly play a role in the stance-taking activity. In the latter part of this paper, I focused on the interactive nature of stance taking. A careful analysis of the interaction between participants in one type of activity environment, story completion, presented further evidence of the fact that stance taking is an interactive activity engaged in by coparticipants in conversation, rather than being an isolated mental activity of an individual speaker. When making a concluding assessment of the preceding story, speakers display an orientation toward involving recipients in the assessment activity, and recipients generally join in to negotiate a shared stance toward, and an understanding of, the story or

724


some aspect of the story. But such joint stance taking is not only a form of participation in the reception of a story, it is often simultaneously a negotiation of some underlying social norm or value implicit in the story. Because assessments involve taking up a position, and assessors can be held responsible for the positions they state (Goodwin and Goodwin 1992), participants in interaction have motivation to make sure that the stances they advocate, and the understandings that they jointly reach, are such that they can be held accountable for them. Therefore it is understandable that at least a working agreement is often negotiated before the topic is closed. Only when stance is approached by students of language as something jointly oriented to by the coparticipants can we hope to observe linguistic patterns of stance taking that go beyond specific, discrete grammatical or lexical devices analyzable in single-speakers’ contributions. As I demonstrated above, constructions that are considered prototypically subjective in linguistic theory, such as I think , are really intersubjective in nature. Furthermore, as we have seen, in natural discourse many patterns of stance taking may show a phonological, syntactic, and /or semantic resonance between the contributions of di¤erent speakers. Such global patterns have not been examined in any detail by linguists so far, perhaps for the simple reason that they cannot be observed without attention to a larger context than single-speaker contributions.

Appendix: Transcription conventions (from Du Bois et al. 1993)

Units Intonation unit {carriage return} Truncated intonation unit -Truncated word Transitional continuity Final . Continuing , Appeal (seeking a validating response from listener) ? Speakers Speech overlap [ ] (numbers inside brackets index overlaps) Accent and lengthening Primary accent (prominent pitch movement ^ carrying intonational meaning) ` Secondary accent Lengthening ¼

Stance taking in conversation Pause Long and medium (length indicated in seconds) Short (brief break in speech rhythm) Vocal noises e.g., (TSK), (SNIFF), (YAWN), (DRINK) Glottal stop Exhalation Inhalation Laughter (one pulse) Quality Piano: soft Higher pitch level Lowered pitch level Voice of another Transcriber’s perspective Uncertain hearing Analyst comment

725

. . . (1) ..

% (Hx) (H) @

P> HI> LO> VOX>

((WORDS))

Notes 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

This paper is based on work done in a research project entitled ‘Interactional practices and linguistic resources of stance-taking in spoken English’ and has been financed by the Academy of Finland (grants 00381 and 53671). Some parts of this paper have been published in Ka¨rkkaïnen (2003b) while some material is included in Ka¨rkkaïnen et al. (forthcoming). I have had valuable comments on an early version of this paper from Sandy Thompson and Jack Du Bois, to both of whom I owe sincere thanks. I am also very grateful to Robin Shoaps and Paul Kockelman for many challenging questions and insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Many thanks also go to three anonymous reviewers of Text & Talk , as well as three other reviewers during an earlier developmental stage of this article. Any remaining inconsistencies, ambiguities, or mistakes are solely my own. The division into descriptive versus expressive functions of language is by no means unproblematic, and many linguists have come to believe, as Ochs (1986: 256) puts it, that ‘all sentences expressed in context will have an a¤ective component’. In some contexts the a¤ect conveyed is one of distance and objectivity in expressing information, while in others the subjective and the personal is more overtly expressed. For English, see, e.g., Palmer (1986), Chafe (1986), Biber and Finegan (1989), and Biber et al. (1999); for a typological overview, see Willett (1988); and for an overview of linguistic work on evidentiality as indexing social meaning, see Fox (2001). The authors focused on transitivity in conversational data and especially on what is called ‘argument structure’ in linguistics, i.e., the grammar of the verb and its arguments. Their main finding was that clauses in English conversation are low in transitivity (see also Section 7 of the present paper). The frequency of first-person evaluative statements has also been noted by Dahl (2000). His data on Swedish conversation show a high frequency of egocentric expressions,

726

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Elise Ka¨ rkka¨ inen which for him include first-person as well as second-person and generic pronouns that cluster with mental-state verbs ( tro ‘believe’, tycka ‘think’, ta¨ nka ‘think’, minnas ‘remember’, etc.), as well as with verbs relating to external appearance ( verka ‘seem’, se ut ‘look, appear’) and with copular verbs (vara ‘be’, bli ‘become’). For Dahl, these patterns are evidence of the inherent nature of discourse to reflect the speaker’s point of view. Indeed, a similar stance was advocated by Benveniste (1971: 224–225), who did not treat subjectivity as prior to intersubjectivity, but rather the other way around: Consciousness of self is only possible if it is experienced by contrast. I use I only when I am speaking to someone who will be a you in my address. It is this condition of dialogue that is constitutive of person, for it implies that reciprocally I becomes you in the address of the one who in turn designates himself as I .

7.

8.

Du Bois (2004) also brings into focus a third dimension of stance taking, namely the objective dimension, the stance object: that speakers orient to a shareable stance object provides further evidence that subjectivity cannot mean an escape to the mental interior. Lyons, like many others, mentions the concept of ‘truth’ in his definition of epistemic modality: Any utterance in which the speaker explicitly qualifies his commitment to the truth of the proposition expressed by the sentence he utters, whether this qualification is made explicit in the verbal component [. .] or in the prosodic or paralinguistic component, is an epistemically modal, or modalized, utterance. (Lyons 1977: 797)

9.

10.

Biber et al. (1999), however, define epistemic stance markers much more broadly as presenting speaker comments on the status of information in a proposition. My decision to consider hearsay evidentials such as he or she said as a subtype of epistemic stance is based on the following. Besides conveying one kind of speaker perspective toward knowledge, namely that the speaker has heard the information from somebody else, in my database hearsay evidentials also behave remarkably similar to prototypical epistemic markers such as I think : they are highly frequent, they commonly occur in intonation-unit-initial position, and are often prosodically unmarked (unaccented or receiving only secondary stress, faster in tempo, reduced in phonetic substance to the point of deletion of the subject pronoun). Furthermore, my data provide evidence that utterance verbs are used as epistemic phrases that (simply) frame the stance expressed in the actual direct speech that follows (see Holt 1996, 2000; Shoaps 1999; and Clift 2000 for the claim that reported speech can indirectly express the reporting speaker’s stance toward some past state of a¤airs or toward the reported speaker). This is not unlike utterances that start with an epistemic marker such as I think , in which this marker often only frames a stance that is expressed in the rest of the utterance, rather than in itself expressing a clear stance in many contexts of use. The decision to start out by the frequency of occurrence of a coherent semantic system, that of epistemic modality (and only subsequently analyzing the interactional use made of it) is mainly due to my research history, which in turn reflects a common approach in pragmatic and discourse-functional linguistics. Ochs (1992: 417) also observes this tendency of linguistic studies to focus analysis on lexical and grammatical systems that index a single situational dimension, e.g., evidential systems that index epistemic stance, because the dimension in question is usually ‘grammaticized or lexicalized in complex and interesting ways’. Not surprisingly, the latter half of my work (Ka¨rkkaï-


11.

12.

13.

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nen 2003a) then concentrated on the interactional functions of only one marker, I think . Robin Shoaps ( personal communication) aptly points out that linguists are basing the whole idea of ‘subjectivity’ (rather than recognition of intersubjectivity) on folk theories of language and the mind. The utterance-initial occurrence of stance markers has been commented on in passing in some other studies as well, such as Biber et al. (1999), Anward (2000), and Thompson (2002). Auer (1996) discusses the pre-front field in spoken German, a grammatical position sometimes (but not always) realized as prosodically integrated with the rest of the utterance, in which case it is analogous to intonation-unit-initial position. One of its discourse functions is said to be expressing something like epistemic stance (Auer 1996: 310–312). Auer (1996: 312) says of the pre-front field that: Above all, it is iconic: the frame is clearly separated from the framed structure, and it precedes it. Cognitively, this ensures that the context in which the following utterance is to be processed is available from the very start of the interpretation process, thus avoiding cognitively and/or interactionally demanding repair work.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

One sequence type not discussed here is points of transition in discourse (topic shifts, shifts to metadiscourse or subsidiary information, shifts back to an earlier point or to a completely new point), where I think acts as a boundary marker for the benefit of the recipient (Ka¨rkkaïnen 2003a). In such cases its referential meaning is vague, to the point that the subject pronoun may sometimes even be omitted. Note however that Goodwin and Goodwin (1992: 155) also state that assessments can be organized as an interactive activity that not only includes multiple participants but potentially also types of actions that are not themselves ‘assessments’. Resonance of the various lexical, syntactic, and prosodic resources across speaking turns can be considered to be manifestations of the overall poetic parallelism in dialogue that was originally observed by Jakobson (1981) and which has been further developed and elaborated by Silverstein (1984), Tannen (1987, 1989), Norrick (1987), and the various contributions in Johnstone (1994). Anward (2004: 41) notes of what he considers core turns in conversation that ‘new turns are made from recycled old turns, in such a way that the overall format, the frame, of the old turn is kept, but a new expression is substituted for a part of the old turn, normally its rheme and/or its stance marker’. Anward (2000) has pointed out that speakers may appropriate each other’s phonological sound material and resort to prosodic recycling and matching of sounds in their turn design.

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Kärkkäinen 2006 Stancetaking in conversation From subjectivity to intersubjectivity

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