Certainty-uncertainty – and the Attitudinal Space in Between
Certainty-uncertainty – and the Attitudinal Space in Between

Author: Sibilla Cantarini

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2014-11-15

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 9027269149

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The selected papers of this volume cover five main topics, namely ‘Certainty: The conceptual differential’; ‘(Un)Certainty as attitudinality’; ‘Dialogical exchange and speech acts’; ‘Onomasiology’; and ‘Applications in exegesis and religious discourse’. By examining the general theme of the communication of certainty and uncertainty from different scientific fields, theoretical approaches and perspectives, this compendium of state-of-the-art research papers provides both an interdisciplinary comparison of the latest investigations, methods and findings, and new advances and theoretical insights with a common focus on human communication.

Communicating Certainty and Uncertainty in Medical, Supportive and Scientific Contexts
Communicating Certainty and Uncertainty in Medical, Supportive and Scientific Contexts

Author: Andrzej Zuczkowski

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2014-11-15

Total Pages: 423

ISBN-13: 9027269211

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This volume is a collection of 18 papers on the communication of certainty and uncertainty. The first part introduces recent theoretical developments and general models on the topic and its relations with modality, subjectivity, inter-subjectivity, epistemicity, evidentiality, hedging, mitigation and speech acts. In the second part, results from empirical studies in medical and supportive contexts are presented, all of which are based on a conversational analysis approach. These papers report on professional dialogues including advice giving in gynecological consultations, breaking diagnostic bad news to patients, emergency calls, addiction therapeutic community meetings and bureaucratic-institutional interactions. The final part concerns the qualitative and quantitative analysis of corpora, addressing scientific writing (both research and popular articles) and academic communication in English, German, Spanish and Romanian. The collection is addressed to scholars concerned with the topical issues from a theoretical and analytical perspective and to health professionals interested in the practical implications of communicating certainty or uncertainty.

Attitude and Stance in Discourse
Attitude and Stance in Discourse

Author: Liliana Ionescu-Ruxăndoiu

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2022-01-27

Total Pages: 511

ISBN-13: 1527579484

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Stancetaking is inherent in verbal communication, as it is connected with the expression of subjectivity and the construction of intersubjectivity in discourse. This book presents theoretical findings in this field and their practical implications, exploring the variations in time and space of meaning negotiation processes in a large variety of communicative forms, including political and judicial discourse, journalism, fiction, private letters, informal conversations, and school debates. Some articles refer to events with a strong impact on social and political life, such as the COVID-19 pandemic or Ceaușescu’s trial. The volume’s approach is mainly pragma-rhetoric and interactional, but also interdisciplinary, promoting dialogue between stance researchers in different fields. There is a specific focus on possible applications of some key findings of stance research in improving inter-ethnic communication and the teaching of foreign languages, as well as students’ communicative abilities.

Questions and Epistemic Stance in Contemporary Spoken British English
Questions and Epistemic Stance in Contemporary Spoken British English

Author: Andrzej Zuczkowski

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2021-03-11

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 1527567346

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This volume explores a model of epistemic stance, according to which speakers can communicate each single piece of information either as known/certain or uncertain or unknown. It presents a qualitative analysis of extracts from the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 to support the idea that questions come from two distinct epistemic positions: the Unknowing and the Uncertain; this latter ranges along two poles: Not Knowing Whether and Believing. In the epistemic continuum, Unknowing questions express a lack of knowledge and range from open to closed and dual wh-questions. On the other hand, Uncertain questions express a lack of certainty and range from maximum uncertainty (Not Knowing Whether-questions advancing a doubt) to minimum uncertainty (Believing-questions advancing a supposition). Both Unknowing and Uncertain questions can be directed either at the answerer’s Knowing or Believing position, depending on their aim. The volume will appeal to scholars concerned with the topic of question design and epistemic stance from a theoretical and analytical perspective, as well as those interested in applying these findings in their teaching practice.

Distance in Language
Distance in Language

Author: Anastasia Meermann

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2015-06-18

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1443878847

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The conceptual metaphor of ""distance"" plays a crucial role in current perceptions of the world and humans' various interactions within it. It hardly seems possible to conceptualize space and time, emotional involvement in events, and relationships with other people in terms other than ""distance"". As a consequence, this primarily spatial concept figures prominently in the verbal expression of these abstract notions, and is thus highly relevant for the analysis of linguistic phenomena. In recen ...

Irony, Deception and Humour
Irony, Deception and Humour

Author: Marta Dynel

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2018-03-19

Total Pages: 504

ISBN-13: 1501507923

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This book offers fresh perspectives on untruthfulness entailed in various forms of irony, deception and humour, which have so far constituted independent foci of linguistic and philosophical investigation. These three distinct (albeit sometimes co-occurring) notions are brought together within a neo-Gricean framework and consistently discussed as representing overt or covert untruthfulness. The postulates that represent the interface between language philosophy and pragmatics are illustrated with scripted interactions culled from the series House, which help appreciate the complexities of the three concepts at hand. Apart from affording new insights into the nature of irony, deception and humour, this book critically examines previous literature on these notions, as well as relevant aspects of Grice's philosophy of language. Giving a state-of-the-art picture of untruthfulness, this publication will be of interest to both experienced and inexperienced researchers studying Grice’s philosophy, irony, deception and/or humour.

The Oxford Handbook of Lying
The Oxford Handbook of Lying

Author: Jörg Meibauer

Publisher: Oxford Handbooks

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 689

ISBN-13: 0198736576

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This handbook brings together past and current research on all aspects of lying and deception, from the combined perspectives of linguistics, philosophy, and psychology. It will be an essential reference for students and researchers in these fields and will contribute to establishing the vibrant new field of interdisciplinary lying research.

Epistemic Stance in Dialogue
Epistemic Stance in Dialogue

Author: Andrzej Zuczkowski

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2017-04-11

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 9027265666

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This volume presents a theoretical and practical model for analysing epistemic stance in dialogues, i.e. the positions both epistemic (commitment) and evidential (source of information) which speakers take in the here and now of communication with regard to the information they are conveying and which they express through lexical and morphosyntactic means. According to the results of our studies of different types of corpora, these positions can be reduced to three basic ones: Knowing, Unknowing, Believing (KUB). In the first part of the book, we present the KUB model and its psychological and linguistic backgrounds. In the second part, we provide an exemplary application of the model, by presenting the qualitative and quantitative analysis of dialogues belonging to different genres and contexts. The volume is addressed to scholars concerned with the topical issues from a theoretical and analytical perspective.

Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles
Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles

Author: Chiara Fedriani

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2017-11-15

Total Pages: 504

ISBN-13: 9027265496

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This book offers new perspectives into the description of the form, meaning and function of Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles in a number of different languages, along with new methods for identifying their ‘prototypical’ instances in situated language contexts, often based on cross-linguistic comparisons. The papers collected in this volume also discuss different factors at play in processes of grammaticalization and pragmaticalization, which include contact-induced change and pragmatic borrowing, socio-interactional functional pressures and sociopragmatic indexicalities, constraints of cognitive processing, together with regularities in semantic change. Putting the traditional issues concerning the status, delimitation and categorization of Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles somewhat off the stage, the eighteen articles collected in this volume deal instead with general questions concerning the development and use of such procedural elements, explored from different approaches, both formal and functional, and from a variety of perspectives – including corpus-based, sociolinguistic, and contrastive perspectives – and offering language-specific synchronic and diachronic studies.