| Epistemic modality refers to the different ways that speakers show their commitment toward what they are saying, or their attitudes towards knowledge. My dissertation is a descriptive study of the linguistic patterns formed by expressions of epistemic modality in American English conversational discourse, and the functions that such patterns may have in social interaction.; The data come from the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English, transcribed into intonation units or IUs. I focus on five conversational excerpts, in all comprising 5402 intonation units. To give an initial quantitative overview of the expression of epistemic stance, a database program is used to code for different discourse features at the level of turns, clauses, intonation units and individual words.; My study combines different but complementary methodologies and frameworks for the description of epistemic stance in interaction. I start out by exploring the recurrent linguistic patterns formed by epistemicity in the data, in terms of the grammatical classes and syntactic types used, and in terms of occurrence of epistemic markers in intonation units and in conversational turns. Epistemicity is expressed by a fairly limited set of high-frequency items in the data, and it tends strongly to be expressed IU-initially and within (rather than at the beginnings or ends of) conversational turns. Guided by these findings, the study subsequently focuses on a qualitative analysis of the functions of the most frequent marker of stance, I think, within the framework of Conversation Analysis. A great deal of attention is paid to prosodic contextualization cues, such as encoding in intonation units, utterance stress, intonation, tempo, pitch, tone of voice, pauses and hesitations. The types of functions established for this marker differ, firstly, according to whether I think is intonation unit initial or occurs as a separate intonation unit. Secondly, further differentiation of the functions is possible in the intonation-unit-initial cases, depending on how I think is realized in finer prosodic detail, especially in terms of accent and tempo. |
