The aim of this article is to discuss and illustrate the grammaticalization process and the polysemic and polyfunctional nature of the Spanish and Catalan markers la verdad and la veritat, from an original objectified referential meaning of the forms to a highly subjectified procedural meaning of the markers. The pragmatic meaning of these markers stems from the loss of semantic features and the different uses that they can adopt in a variety of syntactic and pragmatic contexts, where their subjective, evaluative, (...) and intensifying modal dimensions are fully manifested. In lexical terms, they are noun phrases that can take variable and invariable forms. In morphological terms, the variable form is inflected in number and has a referential value, whereas the invariable form, prosodically extraposed, or followed by a verbal predicate when working as pragmatic marker, is always uninflected and is polyfunctional, with a procedural value. When followed by a verbal predicate, la verdad and la veritat acquire a structural dimension, besides their modal illocutionary one, being used as boundary markers that separate description of facts from first person evaluation, in a monologued stretch of discourse. In an interactional context, the marker frequently prefaces counter expectations. In order to show its grammaticalization process, I will discuss and exemplify their role as evidential marker with a truth-attesting value, epistemic modality markers used to introduce the speaker’s attitude to the content of the proposition or to the addressee in the context of an utterance, intensifiers or boosters used to modify the illocutionary force of a speech act, and discourse boundary markers used to delimit real-world facts from personal opinion. In order to account for their polysemic and polyfunctional dimensions, I will propose salient meanings and prototypical functions. (shrink)

Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in lowland Peru, this study examines linguistic resources used for coding agreements in Alto Perené conversation. The study draws on the anthropological tradition of conversation analysis-informed ethnographies. The investigation of agreeing responses is limited to those which allow a projectedly ‘knowing’, or K-plus, participant to raise his or her epistemic status from the sequentially second position. It is shown that Alto Perené K-plus response formats include the evaluative property word kametsari ‘good’ with an intensifier and/or (...) upgraded prosody, argument focus structures, two polarity verbs ari ‘it is the case’ and omapero ‘it is true’, and the verb ñakiro ‘as you can see’. This analysis demonstrates a relationship between the Alto Perené practices of expressing K-plus agreements and the collateral effects arising from the particular meanings and functions of structures which are used for accomplishing an agreeing action. (shrink)

E-patients are increasingly using the Internet to gain knowledge about medical conditions, thereby problematizing the biomedical assumption that patients are ‘lay’. The present paper addresses this development by investigating the epistemic identities of patients participating on an online health forum. Using poststructuralist discourse analysis to analyze a corpus of cardiology-related threads on an ‘Ask a Doctor’ forum, we compare how patients are discursively constructed by online professionals as ‘knowing’ or ‘not knowing’ with the online knowledge identities patients choose for themselves. (...) Analysis reveals a complex picture, with patients positioning themselves and being constructed as biomedical novices, as well as claiming the subject positions of experts challenging medical expertise. This paper provides a snapshot of an important social identity in transition, illustrates a procedure for comparing language use around imposed and self-appropriated identities, and considers discursive choice in relation to the metapragmatic matter of “sayability”. (shrink)

Spanish has a series of evidential discourse markers that combine the lexical semantics of visual perception with reference to inference or hearsay, for example, evidentemente ‘evidently’, por lo visto ‘visibly, seemingly’, al parecer ‘seemingly’ and se ve ‘one sees that, apparently’. The main aim of this article is to examine the grammatical, semantic and interactional properties of these four evidential discourse markers in informal and formal spoken Spanish. From a semantic point of view, we study the evidential values expressed by (...) these markers and discuss the correlations between them. From a functional point of view, we analyse the evidential markers on the basis of discourse-interactional criteria such as illocutionary force, position in the turn and kind of turn. From a grammatical point of view, we address the preferences in terms of person and Tense/aspect/modality experienced by these evidential markers in discourse. The main result of our analysis is that, as far as the semantic and discourse properties are concerned, evidentemente differs from por lo visto, al parecer and se ve que. The former seems to refer primarily to shared thoughts, developing a reading that goes beyond any of the traditionally distinguished evidential values. The three other markers, by contrast, refer to indirect evidence, often combining the evidential values of reported knowledge and inference. In talk-in-interaction, the two types of markers behave differently: evidentemente does not enhance turn-taking, whereas the other markers leave room for the co-participant to give his or her view of the state of affairs. (shrink)

This study investigates moments in which one participant in an interaction embodies that he is “doing thinking,” a display that is commonly referred to as “thinking face. ” From an interactional perspective, it is assumed that embodied displays of “doing thinking” are a recurring social practice and serve interactive functions. While previous studies have examined thinking faces primarily in word searches and storytelling, the present study focuses on argumentative activities, in which children engage in processes of joint decision-making. The paper (...) has two interrelated aims. The first aim is to describe how multiple modalities—beyond the face—are temporally coordinated to create multimodal gestalts of “doing thinking.” It is shown that thinking displays not only involve dynamic imaginative gaze but also stylized bodily postures. The second aim is to generate knowledge about the functions of thinking displays in children's argumentative activities. The analysis describes how both speakers and recipients use thinking displays in different turn positions and align them with verbal talk or silence. The data for this study comprise video recordings of decision-making processes in groups of older children. Drawing on a multimodal approach to situated interaction, it will be proposed that embodied displays of “doing thinking” provide a resource to shape participation frameworks, mark epistemic stances and create epistemic ecologies for collaborative reasoning. By investigating thinking displays in a particular conversational activity, the study sheds light on the diversity and context-sensitive functionality of thinking displays. It also contributes to recent research on children's collaborative reasoning as an embodied discursive practice. (shrink)

This article proposes an analytical framework that combines Conversation Analysis, Positioning Theory, and Stance Analysis to study communalization and distinction as basic interactive mechanisms within group interactions. The framework is based on the premise that participants in multi-party interactions constantly manage the local demands of the ongoing conversation and turn-by-turn talk as well as implicitly or explicitly evoked references to global discourses, which in turn are closely related to the topic currently discussed. By considering both micro- and macro-contextual features in (...) the analysis of group interactions, it is possible to reach a deeper understanding of dynamic group activities. The framework has been empirically developed based on data from a study on epistemic positioning practices in adolescents’ group interactions about popular TV series in Germany. The data comprises ten videotaped focus group discussions that have been elicited in a school context. By applying the framework to the analysis of a single case from the corpus, insights can be gained, both on how group members’ finely adjust their epistemic and evaluative stances as well as on how the participants themselves interactively link their stances to broader discourses. (shrink)

This study examines interactional sequences in which students make assertions about topic-relevant matters in classroom interactions. Using a Conversation Analytical approach, I show how the students’ knowledge claims lead to negotiations of sequential and epistemic rights to make such claims. Through these negotiations, the students upgrade their epistemic stance by repeating or backing their claims with accounts and providing evidence of them. The teachers’ acceptance or rejection of the students’ initiatives displays an orientation to the sequential and topical relevance of (...) the information provided by the students. This study contributes to a better understanding of student initiatives in the classroom, a topic that until now has received scarce attention. Additionally, it contributes knowledge about the negotiation of epistemic authority in relation to assertions and their responses, which may have more general implications for the study of talk-in-interaction. (shrink)

In theatre rehearsals, actors can occasionally be seen getting stuck in the play text, which is called blanking. To overcome such textual difficulties and continue with the given text, a prompter can verbalize the line in question, thus contributing to an actor’s word search by prompting. The paper focuses on interactional practices by which prompters and actors interactionally resolve blanking situations. This study’s data comprises a case collection of 67 prompting situations, which are taken from a 200-h video corpus of (...) a rehearsal process at a professional theatre. These cases demonstrate how theatre professionals organize prompting situations and how they negotiate/sanction prompting actions such as when there was no blanking but a dramatic pause or when the dramatic performance is interrupted due to a missing prompt. In addition to the audiovisual recordings, eye tracking data of the person prompting is also used to describe the coordination of the visual resources in the context of multimodal interaction analysis. The analysis suggests that prompting and blanking persons interactively resolve blankings with the help of verbal and visual markers. (shrink)