A study of dialogic expansion and contraction in spoken discourse using corpus and experimental techniques

Abstract

This study examines the dialogic functions of expansion and contraction of first-person epistemic and evidential Complement-Taking Predicate (CTP) constructions, such as I think complement, I suppose complement and I know complement, in spoken discourse. It combines corpus and experimental methods (i) to investigate whether CTP constructions are used to open up the dialogic space for new ideas or counterarguments, or to fend off alternative views, and (ii) to identify what contextual factors play a role in determining the dialogic force of the constructions. First, an exploratory analysis of CTP constructions in the London–Lund Corpus (LLC) of spoken British English is carried out with the aim to identify important contextual factors and generate hypotheses about their dialogic effects. Then, a laboratory experiment is conducted to test the impact of the three most prominent factors for speakers' interpretations of utterances containing CTPs. The results indicate that CTP constructions do not only serve to expand the dialogic context in which they occur, but also to restrict alternative views. Interlocutor status, the co-occurrence of other stance markers and prosodic marking of first-person CTP are shown to have a significant effect on the dialogic function of the expressions. These findings call into question some claims in appraisal theory about the role of CTP constructions in discourse, and highlight the need for a flexible approach to the analysis of these poly-functional stance expressions.

Challenges of releasing audio material for spoken data: The case of the London-Lund Corpus 2

“…The corpus is annotated for prosodic features such as tone unit boundaries, the direction of the nuclear tone, varying degrees of stress, and paralinguistic features such as whisper and creak (Svartvik and Quirk 1980;Greenbaum and Svartvik 1990). The prosodic annotations have provided searchable data for a broad range of corpus linguistic studies (e.g., Stenström 1984;Aijmer 1996;Paradis 1997;Altenberg 1998;Lenk 1998;Kaufmann 2002;Romero-Trillo 2014;Põldvere et al 2016;Kimps 2018;Lin 2018). However, with data from the 1950s to the 1980s, LLC-1 is less suited for contemporary investigations of speech.…”

Resonance in dialogue: the interplay between intersubjective motivations and cognitive facilitation

“…A particularly compelling environment for resonance is stance-taking. In the present study, stance is understood as an umbrella term for a range of linguistic expressions that convey (i) speakers' opinions, viewpoints, and attitudes towards objects, states, and events (e.g., happy, unsafe, effective), (ii) assessments of certainty, reliability, and limitations of what is conveyed (e.g., I think, obviously, must), and (iii) comments on the discourse itself (e.g., honestly, with all due respect, finally; Chafe & Nichols, 1986;Fuoli, 2017;Hunston & Thompson, 2000;Marín-Arrese, 2015;Martin & White, 2005;Palmer, 2001;Põldvere et al, 2016;Simaki et al, 2017). While there is great variability in our data regarding the functions that these expressions perform, they all contribute to the three key components of stance-taking as proposed by Du Bois (2007): evaluation, positioning, and alignment.…”

A Cross-disciplinary Study on Evaluative Strategies in Research Articles Conclusion Sections

“…It is posited that academic writing as a 'persuasive endeavor' (Hyland, 2011, p.15) not only produces texts with an external reality, but also uses language to acknowledge, construct, and negotiate social interactions. The centrality of evaluative language has prompted many researchers to investigate its use in different written genres, such as research articles (e.g., Jalilifar, Bardideh & Shooshtari, 2018;Jalilifar, Hayati, & Mashhadi, 2012;Millán, 2014), movie reviews (e.g., Taboada, Carretero, & Hinnell, 2014), book reviews (e.g., Alcaraz-Ariza, 2002), students' argumentative writings (e.g., Liu, 2013;Liu & McCabe, 2018;Liu & Thompson, 2009;Mori, 2017;Myskow & Ono, 2018;Ngo & Unworth, 2015;Wu & Alison, 2003), university lectures (e.g., Bellés-Fortuño, 2017) as well as spoken discourse (e.g., Fernandes, 2011;Llinares, 2015;Põldvere, Matteo, & Carita, 2016), and translation (Munday, 2015), or biography (Su & Hunston, 2019), to name a few. Appraisal framework is advantageous in two major aspects: Initially, it is located at the discourse semantic level of language.…”