Kärkkäinen 2006 Stancetaking in Conversation From Subjectivity To Intersubjectivity

Stance taking in conversation:
From subjectivity to intersubjectivity

ELISE KA
RKKA
INEN
Abstract
In this paper I argue that stance in discourse is not the transparent linguis-
tic packaging of internal states of knowledge, but rather emerges from
dialogic interaction between interlocutors. Thus, stance is more properly
viewed from an intersubjective vantage point, rather than being regarded
as primarily a subjective dimension of language. I begin by outlining pat-
terns 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 par-
ticipants in story reception sequences and demonstrate that stances often
emerge as a result of joint engagement in evaluative activity. Finally, I con-
centrate on how the particular linguistic resources used for stance taking t
into the intersubjective pattern by demonstrating syntactic, semantic, and
prosodic resonances between contributions by dierent speakers.
Keywords: stance; subjectivity; intersubjectivity; I think; stance taking;
resonance.
1. Introduction
It has become widely accepted within linguistic anthropology and conver-
sation analysis that meanings are co-constructed and social in nature. For
example, in their seminal article Goodwin and Goodwin (1992) investi-
gate the collaborative production of assessments (or the evaluation of
persons, events, objects, etc., being described in talk), during which par-
ticipants can calibrate their separate evaluations of events in their phe-
nomenal 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
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Online 18607349 DOI 10.1515/TEXT.2006.029
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variety, there has until recently been a fairly resolute adherence to single-
speaker contributions as loci of meaning. Similarly, in linguistic studies
on what has variously been termed modality, evaluation, attitude, aect,
subjectivity, or stance, the focus has been on utterances produced by sin-
gle speakers. Many recent treatments regard stance from the point of
view of the individual speaker, i.e., as a static and isolated mental posi-
tion or interior state of an individual speaker, who in expressing her
stance draws from a more or less denite set of (primarily) grammatical
and lexical markers.
However, in this paper I will show that stance is not only constructed by
grammatical or lexical means, but that the sequential occurrence of stance
markers and the degree of syntactic, semantic, and/or prosodic parallel-
ism 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. Purpose
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 lin-
guistic 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 rst-person pronoun) and a verb that denotes a private or
interior cognitive process. Kockelman (personal communication), how-
ever, warns against automatically assuming that reference to the speakers
mental states can be taken as the prototype of subjectivity. His point
is well taken; I think in my data of spoken American English from a vari-
ety of interactional settings often appears in sequential contexts where
its referential meaning is quite vague and bleached (to the point of dele-
tion of the rst-person pronoun), and clearly acts as a discourse marker
that simply frames an upcoming stance or marks boundaries within a
speakers 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
700 Elise Karkkainen
kinds of linguistic resources there are for stance taking in interaction),
without assuming a priori a subjective or stance function for any lin-
guistic 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 is on informal everyday conversation. The data corpus was tran-
scribed 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 into-
nation unit (Chafe 1979, 1987, 1994).
To reiterate, my main aim in this paper is to show that stance is a pub-
lic 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 briey present the ndings of an
earlier, primarily quantitative, discourse-functional study of the most fre-
quent manifestations and patterns of epistemic stance within single
speakers contributions in naturally occurring American English data
(Karkkainen 2003a). Then, in Section 5, using examples of I think I dem-
onstrate that the pervasive patterns established in the speech of single
speakers can be understood to arise from interaction and the intersubjec-
tivity between conversational coparticipants. In Section 6, I turn toward
mapping out some intersubjective, dialogic practices of stance 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 when they are involved in joint stance taking over longer conver-
sational sequences.
3. Subjectivity and stance in linguistics
Let us start with a (linguistic) denition of subjectivity, which comes from
Finegan (1995). He claims that subjectivity is the
. . . expression of self and the representation of a speakers (or, more generally, a
locutionary agents) perspective or point of view in discoursewhat has been
called a speakers imprint. (Finegan 1995: 1)
Stance taking in conversation 701
Subjectivity, then, refers to the phenomenon that the speaker with her at-
titudes 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 aairs, the speaker represents an event
or state of aairs from a particular perspective. When the speakers eval-
uative, aective, and epistemic perspective is reected in her actual lan-
guage choices, we commonly talk about the expressive, emotive, aective,
or attitudinal function of language, as opposed to the referential, cogni-
tive, 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
Traugotts work on subjectivity from the diachronic perspective (1989,
1995, which shows that subjective meaning represents the last stage in se-
mantic change) and Langackers 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 manifesta-
tions of subjectivity have further been the object of intensive linguistic
scrutiny for several decades in dierent languages of the world.
3
Other terms have also been used for the formal-notional domain of the
speakers imprint and subjective perspective, and of late, stance is in-
creasingly gaining ground as a (near) synonym for subjectivity. Kockel-
man (2004) proposes the following denition for stance markers: any
signs that members of a community associate with a speakers personal
contribution to event-construal, where stances are to be understood as
possible kinds of such personal contributions. This denition is not unlike
our denition of subjectivity above, although, crucially, it brings in the
speakers community and therefore takes into account the larger cultural
and ideological dimension. In this paper, my focus is not so much on try-
ing to give a hard and fast denition to this (formal, notional, and cul-
tural) 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 pub-
lic 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 aect, and the speaker
as the center of epistemological perspective (see also Langacker 1985
and many others). In recent discourse-functional and linguistic anthropo-
logical studies, however, subjectivity (or aect) has been shown to inu-
ence a wider range of aspects of language structure and use than has per-
haps been thought (e.g., Ochs and Schieelin 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 cat-
egories such as deictic terms, mood, modality, tense, and evidentials are
indices of the speakers point of view or attitude, but that our everyday
language use is inherently subjective at many, if not most, levels. Indeed,
Ochs and Schieelin (1989: 22) propose that aect permeates the entire
linguistic system, so that linguistic resources for expressing aective and
epistemic stance include, not only the lexicon, but grammatical and syn-
tactic structures (e.g., choice of pronouns, determiners, verb voice, tense/
aspect, sentential adverbs, hedges, cleft constructions, diminutives, aug-
mentatives, quantiers, word order, and so on), phonological features
(intonation, voice quality, sound repetition, sound symbolism), and dis-
course structures (e.g., code-switching as instantiated by taboo words, di-
alect, couplets, and repetition of own/others utterances; Ochs 1992: 412;
Ochs and Schieelin 1989: 1214).
In this vein, Biber et al. (1999: 859) also observe that conversation is
characterized by a focus on interpersonal interaction and by the convey-
ing of subjective information. And Bybee and Hopper (2001: 7) state that
most utterances are evaluative in the sense of either expressing a judg-
ment or presenting the world from the perspective of the self or of the in-
terlocutor. 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 Hop-
per (2001: 25) found that in American-English conversation the speakers
do not talk much about events or actions, but rather display their identi-
ties, 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 lin-
guistic forms (e.g., clause types, syntactic patterns, lexical choices), is cen-
tered 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 partic-
ipants, 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 muns. Scheibman 2001: 77) reect an interactive or empathetic
subjectivity because speakers frequently mediate direct assertions about
other speech-act participants by modal elements (can).
5
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 followsviewing it more as an intersubjective rather than subjec-
tive 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 en-
gagement 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 matterthe speaker com-
menting on the worldbut 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 aective
states in a vacuum; participants in discourse do not merely act, but inter-
act. They achieve intersubjective understandings of the ongoing conver-
sation as they display their own understanding (their subjectivities, if
you like) in their sequentially next turns, while correcting or conrming
those of their coparticipants (Heritage 1984; Nofsinger 1991; Hutchby
and Woott 1998). It is a central claim in conversation analysis that
participants update their intersubjective understandings on a turn-by-
turn 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 suciently enriched inter-
pretation 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 con-
tingencies (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 lin-
guistic research to be a semantically coherent formal, often highly gram-
maticized, 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
considered one of the most frequent manifestations of subjectivity in lan-
guage (Lyons 1977; Palmer 1986). By epistemic stance I mean marking
the degree of commitment to what one is saying, or marking attitudes to-
ward knowledge.
8
This denition also includes evidential distinctions, or
how knowledge was obtained and what kind of evidence the speaker pro-
vides for it (see also Chafe 1986 and Palmer 1986, who subsume eviden-
tials under epistemic modality).
9
The expression of epistemic stance is pervasive in everyday spoken in-
teraction; in fact, speakers mark epistemic stance more frequently than
they mark attitudes or evaluations, or express personal feelings or emo-
tions (Biber et al. 1999; Thompson 2002). Ochs (1992: 419420), how-
ever, claims that both aective 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 Karkkainen (2003a), I
established that epistemic stance marking is, besides frequent, also highly
regular and routinized in terms of the linguistic forms used, as American-
English 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 nding is nicely corroborated by Prechts
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 dierent
stanced words available in English). The most common type of epistemic
marker in my American-English data was a cognitive verb with a rst-
person subject (without the complementizer that after it). A paradigm ex-
ample 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 lin-
guists to be prototypically subjective.
11
Other frequent markers in the
data studied were epistemic phrases (he or she said, I dont 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 ndings.
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 nding from my earlier study is that epistemic
stance marking predominantly occurs initially, i.e., before the actual issue
or question at hand (Karkkainen 2003a).
12
More specically, 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
units. While some might be tempted to attribute such a pattern to cogni-
tive 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 episte-
mic 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 height-
ened speaker commitment. It is worth pointing out that previous treat-
ments 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 neg-
ative 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; Karkkainen 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 il-
lustrates the interactional motivation behind initial marking of epistemic
stance. Rebecca, a lawyer, is preparing a female witness, Rickie, to ap-
pear 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) And,
2 especially,
3 . . I have some . . young single men,
4 . . on my jury panel.
5 Ri: [Mhm],
6 Re: [(H)] And,
7 . . . % I% --
8 . . my . . worry is that they dont . . relate to what a woman
feels,
9 . . whe[n so]mething like that <A is <HI happening HI>,
10 Ri: [Mhm].
11 Re: because their experience would be totally dierent.
12 (H) if a man exposes [himself ],
13 Ri: [(SNIFF)]
14 Re: which,
15 . . a man would never do that.
16 [Be]cause,
17 Ri: [Mhm].
18 [
2
(SNIFF)
2
]
19 Re: [
2
(H)
2
] number one they pick out,
20 ! . . I think . . more vulnerable people. A>
21 Ri: Mhm.
22 Re: (H) But if,
23 . . um,
24 . . . a man . . were to be exposed to,
25 they would . . . laugh,
26 . . or,
27 . . you know,
28 be disgusted,
Rebeccas overall turn design is responsive to the contingencies arising
from approaching a highly sensitive topic in the presence of an actual vic-
tim, Rickie, who generally only provides continuers but does not take
a full speaking turn. This is reected in Rebeccas generally incremental
turn design. While she is producing happening on line 9, she launches
into oering 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 1120. The reason oered in line 11, be-
cause their experience would be totally dierent., 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 wom-
an) before she retracts, which, a man would never do that. (this utterance
in itself involving some hesitation and self-repair). This again requires
further explication, which Rebecca produces in lines 19 and 20, that exhi-
bitionists do not choose men as their victims in the rst place but more
vulnerable people instead. We have good reason to suspect that Rebecca
designs this utterance on the y, 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 her-
self was in fact seen in the talk immediately preceding this segment to be
quite vulnerable: she expressed extreme emotional anxiety over her expe-
rience, was very upset and cried, and can still be heard sniing through-
out 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 1119 is said in uent 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 character-
istics of its current recipient. Marking epistemic stance before the issue at
hand can then in itself be seen as interactionally contingent: as partici-
pants mark their subsequent talk as sensitive by displaying uncertainty,
in this case I think modifying words, phrases or clause fragments, this pre-
pares the recipients to align themselves to the upcoming contentious or
evaluatively loaded message and to design their own subsequent turn-at-
talk accordingly.
In Karkkainen (2003a), I demonstrated that instances of I think clearly
arise from the contingencies of the immediate speakerrecipient interac-
tion 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 dierent slant to why child-
rens bones heal quickly. The conversational topic of childrens bones was
inspired by the specic case, discussed earlier in the recording, of Har-
olds nephew, whose broken leg had healed very quickly.
(2) SBCSAE 0002 Lambada <00:01:07>
Pete (P); Harold (H); Jamie (J)
1 P: Thats like,
2 . . <X I guess X> that he was being hauled around
in a little wagon [
2
and stu
2
].
3 H: [
2
Right
2
].
4 . . . [
3
He ^healed very `quickly
3
].
5 J: [
3
<X `Guess X> kids ^bones,
6 just like
3
] . . [
4
grow
4
][
5
`back
5
] really ^fast (Hx).
7 P: [
4
`M
4
] [
5
hm=
5
].
8 H: [
5
Yeah
5
].
9 ! <HI I `think HI> theyre really `soft to ^start with.
10 J: Theyre `made of ^rubber.
11 . . . <P Th- thats it. P>
12 H: `Thats why b-,
13 . . little ^kids usually dont break their legs ânyway.
In lines 5 and 6 of the extract, Jamie makes a rst 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 Jamies utterance has even come to com-
pletion (Yeah. in line 8). But he immediately produces a second assess-
ment that introduces the real state of aairs: I think theyre really soft
to start with. After Jamies humorous upgraded acceptance of and agree-
ment 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 rst 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 oered in the prior turn as not quite accurate
and that he is about to bring in a slightly dierent take on it. The second
assessment simultaneously projects more talk to account for this new per-
spective, 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 ini-
tiations 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 oers strong evi-
dence that the second component is projected after the rst. Finally,
further support for the speaker orienting toward the rst assessment as
disputable can be obtained from Heritage and Raymond (2005). The au-
thors claim that speakers who nd themselves producing a responsive,
rather than rst, assessment often upgrade their (even similarly positive)
assessment, by using various techniques like conrmation agreement
token, oh-prefacing, tag questions, and negative interrogatives to update
their claimed epistemic access to, and/or rights to assess, a referent
(Heritage and Raymond 2005: 23). The authors further argue (2005: 16)
that oering a rst 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 interac-
tional work. She shows heightened commitment when she produces sev-
eral strong claims about herself as a pill taker, prefaced by several in-
stances of I think.
(3) SBCSAE 0011 This Retirement Bit <00:17:41>
Doris (D); Ang (A); Sam (S)
1 D: . . (H) Then in the afternoon,
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 cant 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
Im 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].
24 S: [No].
25 D: . . . No.
26 . . . Heaven sakes.
27 . . @@@
28 D: . . . (H) <HI Ìm HI> not a very good ^pill taker,
29 Im re- --
30 ! . . I ^think Im [^resenting,
31 A: [Im not êither,
32 but I have] --
33 D: (H) Ìm ^re]senting this [
2
^medicine
2
].
34 S: [
2
(COUGH)
2
]
35 ! D: And Î think its `contributing to my ^problems.
36 I ^really ^do.
37 ! . . . (1) (H) Î think that . . the . . ^cardazam ìs,
38 ! . .Î think that the . . d- ^diarrhetic ìs,
40 (H) % . . . (Hx)
From line 30 onwards, Doris produces two rather strong primary stresses
in each utterance, her speech becomes distinctly faster and louder com-
pared to her immediately preceding talk, and she rushes through what
she has to say in lines 2836 without pausing or yielding the oor (Angela
tries in vain to break into the conversation in lines 31 and 32). In prior
discourse especially one coparticipant has oered premature advice: An-
gelas questions on lines 12, 13, and 23 can be heard as giving advice on
how to act in order to reduce the harmful eects of the medicine and to
make pill-taking a regular (and potentially thus less harmful) activity.
Angela further oers a display of aliation very likely to be followed by
advice on lines 31 and 32, Im not êither, but I have --, in eect trying
to interrupt Doriss troubles-telling sequence (see Jeerson 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 inter-
active activity, an interactional practice engaged in by coparticipants in
conversation, rather than a way of framing an isolated thought or posi-
tion of an individual speaker.
6. Stance taking as an interactive activity
In this section, we will broaden the scope of analysis from an individ-
ual speakers stance, toward stance taking as a joint interactive activity
between conversational coparticipants. Instead of starting from pre-
established 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 anities 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 inuenced 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 conversa-
tional narrative. Within conversation analysis, Jeerson (1978) discusses
this environment as one where exit from the story is negotiated between
teller and recipients, typically showing the tellers orientation to what a
recipient makes of the story, and recipients in turn displaying their ap-
preciation. Scheglo (1984: 44) also points out that there is a structural
place for story recipients to display their appreciation of the story com-
pletion and their understanding of the story, and that these are often
linked tasks.
Some terminological points need to be claried here. I use the terms
assessment, opinion, evaluative utterance/turn, and the stance en-
coded therein somewhat interchangeably. But where assessments have
been dened 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 evalua-
tive 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 assess-
ment. 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.
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, Li-
sabeth. Alina has just told Lenore about Lisabeths recent encounter
with Alinas mother, during which Lisabeth had complained that Alinas
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) <VOX [Well,
4 ! L: [(H)] [
2
Poor Lisabeth
2
].
5 A: youve] hur[
2
t my feelings
2
],
6 and bu[
3
h
3
] VOX>.
7 L: [
3
(H)
3
]
8 A: [
4
Moms go-
4
] --
9 ! L: [
4
`Maybe shes just
4
] kind of ^dense.
10 ! `Hunh.
11 A: (H) . . `Well,
12 . . she `wants everything on her [^terms].
13 L: [(H)]
14 A: [
2
You `know
2
].
15 L: [
2
Ìs she `vicious or ^dense
2
].
16 A: . . `Shes a <LO ^dope LO>.
17 (H)
18 L: @[@@]@
19 A: [So],
20 L: @ <@ Èxplains that @>.
21 [@@@@]
22 A: [@@@ <@ Èxactly @>.
23 (H) So],
24 t- Mom said,
25 you know,
26 % she goes,
27 when can I see you.
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 Alinas mother: she never calls her.
The mothers rather unsympathetic reply to Lisabeth on line 1, reported
by Alina with a curt prosody and clear falling intonation, and Alinas
subsequent malicious and very loud laughter can be interpreted by Le-
nore 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 shes
just kind of dense. Hunh. She also happens to start the assessment simulta-
neously while Alina still continues to talk and to act out Lisabeths imag-
inary reply to the mother (lines 3, 5, and 6), which makes it apparent that
Lenores projection of closure misred. 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 Alinas
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 Alinas 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 eect not simply a case of the recipient producing an understand-
ing upon story completion that is unacceptable for the teller, cf. Scheglo
1984: 45). That Alina interrupts her story and oers 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 Lenores rst as-
sessment, 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), Alinas subsequent evaluation is not in full agreement
with Lenores assessment. Alina starts with Well, a potential disagree-
ment 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 por-
trays Lisabeth as a domineering, rather than stupid, person. It is possible
that the signicance 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
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. Alinas subsequent turn,
Shes a dope., does not really choose either one of Lenores 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 Lenores initial
assessment on lines 9 and 10. But she dierentiates her stance rather pre-
cisely by choosing a third assessment signal instead of one oered by Le-
nore. Her pitch also falls markedly on ^dope. These choices appear to be
doing something in addition to simply oering 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 Alinas 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 contri-
bution 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 con-
tinue her story starting at line 23 with a conjunction so.
What becomes clear from the example above is that involving ones
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 conver-
sational story is told, with a more or less clear stance becoming obvious
in its course, that the recipients are able to oer the right kind of under-
standing 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 recipi-
ents initial assessment pass. This example also demonstrates the impor-
tance of establishing a provisional consensus regarding the kind of stance
that is being jointly constructed (e.g., Lenores question Is she vicious or
dense and Lenores reply Shes a dope). In other words, participants dis-
play an orientation toward reaching a common understanding and a
shared stance (for the actual linguistic design of such turns, see Section
7). And nally, such activities are usually brought to some sort of comple-
tion 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
English) classroom in Houston. She has just told Carolyn and Kathy, her
sisters, about her generally very negative experiences: despite frequent at-
tempts, she has been unsuccessful in securing a free lunch ticket for one of
her pupils, because the school bureaucracy prevents her from nding out
whether the girls application form has been led in the rst place. The
story is another example of troubles talk, and in answer to yet another
piece of advice oered by Kathy before the example segment starts (. .
You gotta go in and talk to the principal about this.), Sharon nally
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 that
2
].
2 K: [
2
@@@@@@
2
]
3 S: (H) that youre gonna tell me,
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 cant access,
11 . . you know,
12 . . her form?
13 C: . . . (TSK)
14 S: <P Whats the deal. P>
15 ! C: [(H) Theyre just `giving--
16 ! K: [Unbelievable].
17 ! C: I `think],
18 ! it `sounds,
19 ! like,
20 ! to `me,
21 ! theyre `giving you a lot of ^shit for no ^@reason.
22 S: (H) . . `Well they ^really are ^picking on the `fact that Im
^new,
23 like,
24 . . y- --
25 uh,
26 [Its really ânnoying].
27 C: [The `fact that youre ^new],
28 ùh,
29 . . ùh,
30 S: [That I] --
31 C: [Ì would],
32 . . Ì would go ^further than `that.
33 S: Ìm not ^certied.
34 . . Ànd,
35 >E: ((SIREN_STOPS))
36 C: ^Yeah,
37 [@@]
38 S: [its like],
39 the [
2
teachers
2
],
40 C: [
2
and
2
],
41 S: Coop this last week,
42 C: <X `@cant X>,
43 S: (H) First theyre like,
44 . . rst I only had fteen kids.
45 right?
Throughout the story, Sharon had presented herself as a rather active
agent. Carolyn makes a concluding assessment on lines 1521: Theyre
just giving-- I think, it sounds, like, to me, theyre giving you a lot of shit
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 dierent
ways: it can be heard as projecting that there is more to it and that Caro-
lyn 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 ef-
fect excludes all reasons). Sharon then oers a second less than fully ali-
ating 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 disaliates with Sharons assessment by repeating
what to her is the problematic part in it, The fact that youre 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 ac-
counting 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 oer the
real reason: Im not certied. 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 experi-
ences at the school, now specically to Kathy or Coop (her nickname),
while Carolyn can be heard to say and, <X @cant X>. The full signi-
cance of this truncated utterance cannot be deciphered with certainty,
but one interpretation is that Carolyn was going to convey that it is in-
deed not possible for a noncertied 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 teach-
er but a noncertied 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 signicant that the two participants jointly formulated the conclu-
sion that the underlying reason for Sharons maltreatment is the fact that
she is not a qualied teacher. This had not emerged from Sharons earlier
troubles-telling story in any way, nor was it explicit in Carolyns rst as-
sessment in lines 1521. Rather it emerged in the course of the joint
stance-taking sequence that the participants were engaged in. Story recep-
tion 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 estab-
lished and negotiated as an interactional practice. The articulation and
dierentiation 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 evalua-
tions, 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 dia-
logic 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 pre-
established 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, nally, 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 dia-
grammatic form, by mapping the relevant intonation units produced by
dierent speakers onto each other (roughly) according to syntactic struc-
ture (see diagraphs within the theory of dialogic syntax outlined in Du
Bois 2001 and forthcoming). Such a representation makes visible the per-
vasiveness of (at least) two frequent dialogic practices of stance taking.
The rst 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 struc-
ture across speakers and speaking turns, in other words the resonance of
syntactic structures, semantic meanings, and prosodic devices used.
16
Resonance has been dened by Du Bois (2003) as the activation of po-
tential anity 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 dif-
ferent turns by dierent speakers. As can be seen in Figure 1, epistemic
stance markers tend to occur initially, i.e., before the actual issue or ques-
tion 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
C: They re just `giving--
I `think,
it `sounds,
like,
to `me,
they re `giving you a
lot of ^shit
for no ^@reason.
S: `Well they ^really are ^picking on the `fact that Im ^new,
C: The `fact that youre
^new,
Ì would go ^further than `that,
S: Ì m not ^certied.
Initial framing of
stance before
assessment:
I think, it sounds,
like, to me,
well
Syntactic resonance:
parallel syntactic structure:
subject pronoun, verb tenses
intensiers (a lot of, really)
extracting and repeating
object from prior turn
Semantic resonance:
synonymous predicate
verbs (give a lot of
shit & pick on)
Prosodic resonance:
e.g., stress, intonation-
unit-nal intonation
Figure 1. Diagraph of Example (5) Raging Bureaucracy
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 natu-
ral discourse, it is much more usual for epistemic stance markers to pat-
tern intonation-unit-initially (Karkkainen 2003a). We also saw in Section
5 that initial framing in itself can be seen as interactionally motivated: es-
tablishing 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 interac-
tion one speaker often constructs a stance based partly on the immedi-
ately co-present stance of a coparticipant.
Words and structures and other linguistic resources invoked by the rst speaker
are reused by the second, whether the second speakers stance is parallel, opposed,
or simply orthogonal to the rsts. (Du Bois 2000: 3)
Such recycling across speakers and turns may result in considerable struc-
tural 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). Specically, we can see this in the
diagraph of Example (5): even though in their rst turns Carolyn and
Sharon take slightly dierent positions and focus on slightly dierent is-
sues (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 intensier.
17
The two utterances also resonate se-
mantically, as the predicates are synonymous. The dierentiation of stan-
ces comes at the level of the adverbial clause, for no reason, versus object
of the verb, the fact that Im new. What is more, Carolyns second disa-
ligning turn is directly built on the structure and meaning conveyed in
Sharons previous turn, by extracting a syntactic segment, the object The
fact that youre new, out of it. Anward observes of this phenomenon,
where the recycled element occupies the rheme position in an utterance
(as it does in Sharons turn):
Repeating or retaining another participants rheme, in contrast to doing a varia-
tion on it, may thus indicate not only continuity of a contribution but also trouble
of some sort. (Anward 2004: 37)
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 Sec-
tions 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 rst-person state-
ments. Carolyns choice to make a rst-person statement (I would go
further than that., projecting elaboration) instead of a second-person one
(e.g., saying directly Youre not certied.) enables Sharon herself to actu-
ally produce the real reason, which she indeed does by similarly using a
rst-person statement (Im not certied.). Bybee and Hoppers (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 interloc-
utor 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 intransi-
tive verbal clauses (I forgot); copular clauses (it was condential ); and
epistemic/evidential clauses (I dont think its 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 contri-
butions, index attitude and situation, evaluate, and negotiate empatheti-
cally with other participants. In the light of such ndings, 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 Im ^new, and The `fact that youre ^new, are produced al-
most identically in terms of stress and nal intonation contour (con-
tinuing intonation). The same goes for the next two utterances or the
I-statements in Ì would go ^further than `that. and Ìm not ^certied.
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 semanti-
cally parallel and resonate, even though, as we saw above, the very choice
of a dope instead of dense by Alina has the eect of dierentiating her
stance from Lenores. While it could be argued that such dierentiation
is a display of the storytellers claim to primary rights to assess (cf. Heri-
tage and Raymond 2005), it is nevertheless a striking instance of recy-
cling with dierance (Anward 2004), i.e., of a more general pattern of
the participants performing varied operations in especially rhematic recy-
cling to create a dierence to the prior contribution and its rheme: one
example mentioned by Anward (2004: 44) is nding a semantically re-
lated expression for an expression used so far.
What is also striking in the example above is the degree of phonologi-
cal recycling and sound similarities involved in the choice of lexical items:
dense and dope are not just similar semantically, but they also show allit-
eration and contain the same number of syllables (even though they rep-
resent dierent 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 conver-
gent stance between speakers, as opposed to the dierentiation of stances
brought about by their choice of dierent lexical items (dense and dope;
see also Szczepek 2001 for types of prosodic orientation or how one
speaker responds prosodically to another speakers prosody).
By oering these preliminary observations about similarities in forms
and meanings across dialogic turns, I do not mean to suggest that reso-
nance and parallelism are a necessary feature of stance-taking sequences
specically. 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 aliation; on the contrary, as we saw
above, some ne-tuned dierentiation of stances can be achieved by
means of nearly parallel and resonating structures. As Tannen (1987:
L: `Maybe she `s just kind of ^dense.
A: `Well she `wants everything on her own
^terms.
L: ìs she `vicious or ^dense.
A: `She `s a ^dope.
L: <@ Explains `that @>.
A: <@Èxactly @>.
Initial framing
of stance:
maybe, well
Syntactic resonance:
parallel syntactic frame
parallel verb tenses
Semantic resonance:
dense & dope
Prosodic resonance:
e.g., stress, intonation-unit-nal
intonation
phonological recycling and
sound similarities (dense &
dope, explains that & exactly)
Figure 2. Diagraph of Example (4) Cuz
599) puts it, the metamessage of involvement communicated by repeti-
tion 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; none-
theless, 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 rst 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-speakers contributions, the term subjectivity of course reecting
this bias), it is clearly necessary to regard it as such. I argue that it is pref-
erable 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 speakers personal contribution, and which is perhaps
most useful for capturing the referential meanings of the relevant linguis-
tic resources. When our focus of inquiry is the description of the interac-
tional 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 nd that what appear to us as subjective
elements of language emerge rst 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 reect the analy-
sts 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 ne-
gotiate a shared stance toward, and an understanding of, the story or
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 ne-
gotiation 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 under-
standable 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 specic, discrete grammatical or
lexical devices analyzable in single-speakers contributions. As I demon-
strated above, constructions that are considered prototypically subjec-
tive in linguistic theory, such as I think, are really intersubjective in na-
ture. 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 dierent 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
Pause
Long and medium (length indicated in seconds) . . . (1)
Short (brief break in speech rhythm) . .
Vocal noises
e.g., (TSK), (SNIFF), (YAWN), (DRINK)
Glottal stop %
Exhalation (Hx)
Inhalation (H)
Laughter (one pulse) @
Quality
Piano: soft <P P>
Higher pitch level <HI HI>
Lowered pitch level <LO LO>
Voice of another <VOX VOX>
Transcribers perspective
Uncertain hearing <X X>
Analyst comment ((WORDS))
Notes
1. 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 nanced by
the Academy of Finland (grants 00381 and 53671). Some parts of this paper have
been published in Karkkainen (2003b) while some material is included in Karkkainen
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.
2. 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 aective component. In some con-
texts the aect conveyed is one of distance and objectivity in expressing information,
while in others the subjective and the personal is more overtly expressed.
3. 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).
4. 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 argu-
ments. Their main nding was that clauses in English conversation are low in transitiv-
ity (see also Section 7 of the present paper).
5. The frequency of rst-person evaluative statements has also been noted by Dahl (2000).
His data on Swedish conversation show a high frequency of egocentric expressions,
which for him include rst-person as well as second-person and generic pronouns that
cluster with mental-state verbs (tro believe, tycka think, tanka think, minnas re-
member, 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 reect the speakers point
of view.
6. Indeed, a similar stance was advocated by Benveniste (1971: 224225), 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 dia-
logue 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. 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.
8. Lyons, like many others, mentions the concept of truth in his denition of epistemic
modality:
Any utterance in which the speaker explicitly qualies his commitment to the truth of
the proposition expressed by the sentence he utters, whether this qualication is made
explicit in the verbal component [. .] or in the prosodic or paralinguistic component, is
an epistemically modal, or modalized, utterance. (Lyons 1977: 797)
Biber et al. (1999), however, dene epistemic stance markers much more broadly as
presenting speaker comments on the status of information in a proposition.
9. 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 per-
spective 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 com-
monly 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 pro-
vide 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 speakers stance toward some past state of aairs 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.
10. 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 reects 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 (Karkkai-
nen 2003a) then concentrated on the interactional functions of only one marker, I
think.
11. 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.
12. 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 Thomp-
son (2002).
13. Auer (1996) discusses the pre-front eld 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: 310312). Auer (1996: 312) says of the pre-front eld 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. 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 benet of the
recipient (Karkkainen 2003a). In such cases its referential meaning is vague, to the
point that the subject pronoun may sometimes even be omitted.
15. 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.
16. 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).
17. 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.
18. Anward (2000) has pointed out that speakers may appropriate each others phonologi-
cal sound material and resort to prosodic recycling and matching of sounds in their
turn design.
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Elise Karkkainen is a Research Fellow with the Academy of Finland, based at the Univer-
sity of Oulu. Her research has dealt with dierent aspects of conversational English, espe-
cially modality, preferred argument structure, and epistemic stance. She is the author of
Epistemic Stance in English Conversation. A Description of Its Interactional Functions, with
a Focus on I think (2003, Benjamins) and has conducted a research project entitled Interac-
tional Practices and Linguistic Resources of Stance-Taking in Spoken English 20022005
(URL: 3http://www.ekl.oulu./stance/4). Address for correspondence: Department of En-
glish, Box 1000, 90014 University of Oulu, Finland 3elise.karkkainen@oulu.4.

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