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.

Widely considered to be a foundational work in the field of listening, Teaching and Researching Listening is among the most recommended textbooks in applied linguistics oral communication courses, and the most cited reference in current research on second language listening development. Known for its comprehensiveness, clarity, insight, and practical applications, this fourth edition has been substantially revised to reflect the latest research in the areas of linguistics, neuroscience, applied technologies, and teaching methodology, with expanded sections on teaching applications and explorations in social research related to listening. This completely revised edition includes: • Detailed overviews of the underlying processes of listening, with additional coverage of decoding processes • Expansion of sections dealing with artificial intelligence (AI), speech recognition, and input enhancement software • Emphasis on research of listening in spoken interaction and cross-cultural communication • Clear templates for instructors and curriculum designers, with an expansive set of practical resources • Guidance in using observational methods for exploring listening in a range of educational and professional contexts • Website support, with presentation slides, infographics, and question banks for each chapter This fourth edition of Teaching and Researching Listening serves as an authoritative and comprehensive survey of issues related to teaching and researching oral communication, providing value for language teachers, educational researchers, instructional designers, interpreters, and other language practitioners.

This book is the first corpus-based description of epistemic stance in conversational American English. It argues for epistemic stance as a pragmatic rather than semantic notion: showing commitment to the status of information is an emergent interactive activity, rooted in the interaction between conversational co-participants. The first major part of the book establishes the highly regular and routinized nature of such stance marking in the data. The second part offers a micro-analysis of I think, the prototypical stance marker, in its sequential and activity contexts. Adopting the methodology of conversation analysis and paying serious attention to the manifold prosodic cues attendant in the speakers' utterances, the study offers novel situated interpretations of I think. The author also argues for intonation units as a unit of social interaction and makes observations about the grammaticization patterns of the most frequent epistemic markers, notably the status of I think as a discourse marker.

This book explores the effects of the global spread of English by reporting on a sequential explanatory mixed-methods study of the language attitudes, motivation and self-perceived English proficiency of youth in two Italian cities. Participant narratives highlight the far-reaching role that English plays on the performance and attainment of present and desired future selves, illustrate that English is understood not as singular but as plural and paradoxical, and reveal that English learners, who do not all accept the capital of ‘native’ speakers, utilize tactics to negotiate their position(s) with respect to their target language. On the one hand, by narrowing in on a specific population and drawing extensively on interview exchanges, this work provides readers with a nuanced depiction of the identities, milieu and learning experiences of English language learners in Italy. On the other hand, this level of detailed analysis gives insight into the understandings, construction of meaning and negotiations of language learners who need and want to acquire English, the global language, worldwide. Indeed, the issues and questions that are raised in this book, such as those concerning research approaches and the definitions assigned to key concepts, have profound implications on the research of English(es) today and can inform future directions in global English teaching.

This volume contributes to the burgeoning field of research on stance by offering a variety of studies based in natural discourse. These collected papers explore the situated, pragmatic, and interactional character of stancetaking, and present new models and conceptions of stance to spark future research. Central to the volume is the claim that stancetaking encompasses five general principles: it involves physical, attitudinal and/or moral positioning; it is a public action; it is inherently dialogic, interactional, and sequential; it indexes broader sociocultural contexts; and it is consequential to the interactants. Each paper explores one or more of these dimensions of stance from perspectives including interactional linguistics and conversation analysis, corpus linguistics, language description, discourse analysis, and sociocultural linguistics. Research languages include conversational American English, colloquial Indonesian, and Finnish. The understanding of stance that emerges is heterogeneous and variegated, and always intertwined with the pragmatic and social aspects of human conduct.

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.

The papers published in this volume were originally presented at the Third North American Symposium on Corpus Linguistics and Language Teaching held on 23-25 March 2001 at the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts. Each paper analyses some aspect of language use or structure in one or more of the many linguistic corpora now available. The number of different corpora investigated in the book is a real testament to the progress that has been made in recent years in developing new corpora, particularly spoken corpora, as over half of the papers deal either wholly or partially with the analysis of spoken data. This book will be of particular interest to undergraduate and graduate students and scholars interested in corpus, socio and applied linguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, and language teaching.

This monograph deals with variable tag questions. These are utterances with a variable interrogative tag, like It's peculiar writing, isn't it, and the semi-variable tag innit, such as Nice, innit. The aim is to provide a corpus-based, comprehensive semantic-pragmatic typology of British English tag questions. Compared to existing descriptions, the proposed typology is novel in three ways. Firstly, whereas almost all existing typologies are single-layered classifications, the functions of tag questions are categorized into two parallel dimensions of interpersonal meaning: the speech function and the stance layer. Secondly, semantic generalizations are proposed for clusters of grammatical, intonational and conversational properties. Thirdly, the bottom-up description is based on a sizeable amount of authentic, spontaneous conversations, which are analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively.

This volume offers a unique collection of articles investigating the often neglected phenomenon of parentheticals, which are commonly seen as expressions interrupting the linear structure of a host utterance, but lacking a structural relation to it. The book provides an up-to-date introduction to the subject, as well as a range of research articles addressing questions including the syntactic link between parenthetical and frame utterance, the relation between syntactic and prosodic form, the usage and interpretation of parentheticals, and many more. It embraces research findings from different European languages (English, German, Dutch, Romance) and covers an array of forms of syntactic interpolations (from one-word parentheticals to clausal) and a range of methodologies, including empirical research, corpus research, and theoretical analyses. The collection underlines the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to a multi-faceted phenomenon such as parentheticals.