Epistemic Markers Research Articles

Reducing the severity of incidents or emergency in Estonian emergency calls

Abstract The aim of the article is to analyze the calls to the Estonian Emergency Response Centre, focusing on instances where callers reduce the severity of incident or emergency in their first turn. The data comprise 39 calls from the Corpus of Emergency Calls of the University of Tartu. The analysis reveals that callers employ mitigating words and negative turn-initial utterances to reduce the severity. These words indicate the caller’s uncertainty about the information provided or suggest that the reported incident or emergency is minor. The utterances are syntactically and semantically (but not prosodically) completed clauses followed by a second part of the clause construction containing specific information about the caller’s issue. Functionally, these utterances serve as assessments falling into three groups based on the information they project. Some assessments project uncertain information, explicitly expressing uncertainty about the information or using the epistemic marker ma=i=tea ‘I don’t know’. The second group of assessments project information about an incident that the caller does not qualify as an emergency. The last group projects a potential incident or emergency using variants of the utterance ei juhtund midagi ‘nothing happened’. In addition, we offer explanations for why callers reduce the severity of the incident or emergency and demonstrate that reducing severity does not lower the probability of sending assistance. This indicates that call-takers do not rely on callers’ assessments when deciding whether the help is needed.

Comment Markers in Spoken English in Korea

The present study examines the use of four categories of comment markers among Korean speakers of English, a category of grammatical items whose use is prompted by pragmatic factors, using the data from the elicited conversation in English. Previous research on comment markers has suggested that comment markers are more frequent in the Inner Circle varieties than in the Outer Circle varieties and that there are systematic differences in the distribution of comment markers between Kachru’s Inner and Outer Circles. Since English is learned and used as an important foreign language in Korea, Korean society which belongs to the Expanding Circle is a suitable context for research on world Englishes and English as a lingua franca as well. Findings from the data analysis indicate that the use of comment markers among Korean speakers of English displays similar features with that of the Outer Circle varieties of English, especially East Asian varieties. Epistemic markers constitute the most sizable subcategory and the frequency of hearsay markers are relatively high raking the second in the data. The implications of the findings for the stylistic preferences and areal co-patterning are suggested. This paper contributes to the body of comment markers across the world Englishes.

Epistemic Modality Constructions as Stable Idiolectal Features: A Cross-genre Study of Spanish

Forensic authorship analysis is based on two assumptions: that every individual has a unique idiolect, and that features characteristic of that idiolect will recur with a relatively stable frequency. Yet, a speaker’s language can change with age, affective states, according to audience, or genre. Thus, studies on authorship analysis should adopt the theory that while some linguistic parameters of an idiolect can remain stable, others can change depending on various circumstances. This investigation, which takes a constructional and functional-based approach to discourse-level phenomena in idiolectal stability, analyzes cross-genre data produced by nine Mexican participants throughout a twelve-year time span. This study contributes to a greater understanding of the linguistic elements that survive genre effects and are potentially useful in both investigative and evidential forensic linguistic work. We provide a detailed description of linguistic features, their specific values, and context-dependent interpretation, keeping in mind the context of expert linguistic testimony, with its preference for methods which “employ linguistically motivated analyses in combination with quantitative tools” (Solan & Tiersma, 2004, p.463).Our findings show that idiolectal style tends to remain stable across genres and communication modes in epistemic modality constructions. Epistemic markers —specifically, markers indicating low commitment by the speaker (e.g., no sé ‘I don’t know’) or expressing indirectness when introducing the illocutionary force (e.g., la verdad [es que] ‘the truth [is that]’)— display idiolectal stability, as these markers seem to be the most effective in terms of allowing speakers to strategically manifest the extent of their knowledge regarding what is said.

EPISTEMIC RHETORIC OF INTERROGATIVES IN POETIC DISCOURSE

The present article is the attempt to analyse interrogatives in poetic discourse through the prism of epistemic rhetoric. The research focus refers to the features that make interrogative an epistemologically identifiable object. In order to provide the ground for conducting this study a conceptual framework has been built which includes the following parameters: 1) epistemic markers of concrete experience; 2) the direction of schematization; 3) epistemic justification of the immediate experience of tropes and figures of speech, and the perceptual world; 4) the direction of conceptual schematization of iconicity. The analysis unfolds into two sections. The first section provides the ontological view of interrogatives while the second one moves into the socio-cultural analysis.

Epistemic Markers in the Scientific Discourse

AbstractThe central role of such epistemic concepts as theory, explanation, model, or mechanism is rarely questioned in philosophy of science. Yet, what is their actual use in the practice of science? Here, we deploy text-mining methods to investigate the usage of 61 epistemic notions in a corpus of full-text articles from the biological and biomedical sciences (N = 73,771). The influence of disciplinary context is also examined by splitting the corpus into subdisciplinary clusters. The results reveal the intricate semantic networks that these concepts actually form in the scientific discourse, not always following our intuitions, at least in some parts of science.

Epistemic phrases and adolescent speech in West London

Adolescents, particularly those in multiethnic, multilingual communities, have become central to sociolinguistic research in the variationist tradition (Cheshire, Nortier & Adger 2015). In several studies of adolescent speech in European urban centres, the same set of Arabic-derived epistemic phrases, namely wallah, wallahi and related phrases meaning ‘swear’, appear to be in use (see, e.g., Quist 2005; Opsahl 2009; Lehtonen 2015). In this article, we document how these phrases are used in the speech of adolescents from a borough of West London and demonstrate the functional similarities between the current data and studies of adolescents in other West European contexts. Using a distributional analysis, we also draw several comparisons between our data and data collected in previous studies of adolescent speech in London. We find functional and distributional similarities and contrasts in both cases. We then discuss the consequences of these findings for the study of epistemic markers and their relevance in adolescent speech.

“Tortured Phrases” in Covid-19 Literature

Medical practitioners and healthcare workers rely on information accuracy in academic journals. Some Covid-19 papers contain “tortured phrases”, nonstandard English expressions, or imprecise or erroneous terms, that give the impression of jargon but are not. Most post-publication attention paid to Covid-19 literature has focused on the accuracy of biomedical aspects, the validity of claims, or the robustness of data, but little has been published on linguistic specificity. This paper highlights the existence of “tortured phrases” in select Covid-19 literature, arguing that they could serve as a class of epistemic marker when evaluating the integrity of the scientific and biomedical literature.

Il n’y a pas à dire, un marqueur discursif du refus de contestation

Abstract This work presents an analysis of the marker il n’y a pas à dire from different perspectives. First, we study its lexicographical treatment in nine dictionaries and its presence in our corpus of written examples of contemporary French. Then, we consider the morphosyntactic and semantic-pragmatic attributes that make it an epistemic marker of the indisputable. With il n’y a pas à dire speakers consider the enunciative content as something undeniable: by using this linguistic unit they protect themselves behind the knowledge that is supposed to be shared with the community they belong to, so a personal assertion can be presented as if it were something already accepted, to which there could be no objection. The commitment to the content modalised by il n’y a pas à dire is thus intensified, because the speakers, who are committed to what they are saying, want to be assertive in the eyes of their interlocutors in order to have this content admitted.

From verb to epistemic marker: bini in Hamedanian Persian

Abstract This paper provides data from a regional dialect of Persian, Hamedanian Persian, where a verb is grammaticalized to be used as epistemic modality marker, frequently used in interrogatives. The verb didan, objectively means ‘to see’, but subjectivized in many instances to mean ‘understand’. However, in this dialect, bini, originally the subjunctive second person singular form of the verb didan ‘to see’, is used as epistemic marker. It is used in content and polar questions, where uncertainty is a common feature. Our fieldwork data show that the verb didan is used rarely to mean ‘to see’ and it extended to mark epistemic modality, used as probability marker. This modal marker is only used in questions, which share the stance of uncertainty with epistemic markers. The various features of this grammaticalization path are discussed and an explanation based on egophoricity is provided.

Requests for Verification across Varieties of Spanish

Abstract This article examines requests for verification across varieties of Spanish. It focuses on the role of gaze behaviour in the design of the request and shows how gaze is interrelated with other resources, such as facial expressions, epistemic markers, prosody and tag questions. By comparing speakers from Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia and Ecuador, the article finds similarities but also differences between the groups of speakers. The speakers from Bolivia and Ecuador rarely establish mutual gaze or use facial expressions during the verification sequence. Instead, more frequently, they deploy other resources for obtaining verifications, such as tag questions, hand gestures and rising intonation. The article considers differences in gaze behaviour within the larger machinery of response mobilisation and shows how gaze is intertwined with other aspects of conversational organisation. Results are based on qualitative and quantitative analysis. The data stems from face-to-face conversations recorded in similar side-by-side settings.

Beyond mere facts: Epistemic profiles of conclusions to English- and Polish-language linguistics articles

Expressions of epistemic stance in academic discourse reflect not only the authors’ commitment to the truth of what is being said, but also their awareness of other members of the discourse community, the current thinking within the discipline, and the established patterns of interaction. Stance-taking is strongly embedded in culture and language, as demonstrated in numerous studies that focus on L2 academic English (e.g. Hinkel 2002; Dontcheva-Navratilova 2018; Wu and Paltridge 2021) and, less often, academic communication in various linguistic contexts (e.g. Perez-Llantada 2010). This paper purues this latter line of inquiry and proposes a contrastive analysis of epistemic markers in conclusions to English- and Polish-language linguistics articles in an attempt to identify their epistemic profiles. Epistemic profile refers here to a combination of two features: the epistemic modal value (Halliday 1985/1994) which is marked more frequently than others across a text or text fragment, and the concurrence of modality markers with specific rhetorical moves (Swales 1990; Yang and Allison 2003). Thus, it provides information about the value of modalization and the type of content that tends to be modalized. The analysis was based on a two-part corpus of conclusions to 400 linguistics articles, with 200 English-language articles drawn from international databases and 200 Polish-language articles published in recognized national journals. In the first stage, the frequencies of epistemic markers in the two sub-corpora were calculated (Scott 2008) and a statistical analysis was applied to determine whether the differences were significant. In the second stage, 50 concluding sections from each sub-corpus were manually annotated for rhetorical moves to determine whether epistemic markers tended to occur within specific moves. The findings show statistically significant differences in the frequencies of high- and low-value epistemic markers in the sub-corpora and a tendency for epistemic markers to occur within moves that offer interpretive content.

The nature of science dimension in the teaching discourse. a case study

Spoken language is the vehicle through which a great deal of teaching takes place, as well as the way in which students show the teacher a great deal of what they have learned. In this context, teaching is mostly a means of providing access to those specific ways of speaking. In particular, metadiscourse is a discursive resource used in discursive exchanges in science classrooms. Despite its importance, metadiscourse has been poorly studied in the science classrooms. One of the metadiscourse methods studied in classrooms is the one corresponding to epistemic markers. The purpose of this study is to analyze how a future Chemistry teacher uses metadiscourse to build scientific knowledge along with the students. A qualitative study of the future teacher’s speech was undertaken from discursive exchanges in a physical chemistry classroom. All classes were video and audio recorded for analysis purposes. From total of four classes, a number of extracts were selected from the third class. Based upon a content analysis, representative categories of epistemic markers in the teacher's verbal discourse were inferred. Discourse markers referred to the scientific law recognition as well as its structure and physicochemical properties thay either vary or remain constant during the phenomenon occurence were found. These markers show the importance of considering an explicit work with the epistemic dimension of the content in order to promote the construction of scientific explanations understanding in the science classroom. Additionally, this importance implies the relevance of engaging the future teachers in reflective practices that demonstrate the work with the nature of science from the discursive use of epistemological markers.

Predicted Conversational Speech: Accuracy and Epistemic Markers

This paper analyzes prediction of speech in conversational interaction realized by informants aged 21-27, which in our context expresses possible future utterances of subjects acquainted with each other. The data is compiled by recorded spoken interaction and interview, where 37 respondents projected utterances that would be said in a certain topic or context by their bestfriend, colleague, crush or a person of certain profession. In total, 1102 options were articulated. When they resulted in coherence with their friend’s, sister’s or colleague’s response (after confirmation through telephone), they stressed the high level of mutual recognition and possibility of psycho-social perception of a person to serve as source for predicting future utterances. Therefore, it is concluded that accurate prediction is highly based on the density of pre-communication, episodic memory of conversations with that person in certain topics, epistemic stance/authority, habitual linguistic behaviors etc. There are found variety of pragma-linguistic manners in which the speaker shows her/his version of what someone else would say. Higher scale of accuracy has been noticed at family members and close friends.

Epistemic Stance in Chinese L2 Spoken English: The Effect of Grade and Genre-Specific Questions

Zuczkowski et al.’s KUB model clarified three epistemic stances: Knowing/Certain, Not Knowing Whether and Believing/Uncertain, and Unknowing/Neither Certain nor Uncertain, according to the speakers’ communicated information, and delineated three types of markers: macro-markers, micro-markers, and morphosyntactic markers. The model has seldom been applied to L2 instruction. To address this gap, the study examines the effect of grade and genre-specific questions on Chinese L2 speakers’ choice of epistemic markers with reference to the model by analyzing the self-built corpus consisting of the oral data collected from two groups: Group One consisting of 20 sophomores and Group Two comprising 20 first-year graduate students. The participants were required to answer four genre-specific questions covering argumentation, description, narration, and exposition. The results show that the two group members use similar epistemic markers (EMs) for the Knowing/Certain and Not Knowing Whether and Believing /Uncertain positions but present a slight discrepancy in Unknowing/Neither Certain nor Uncertain stance-taking. The genre-based questions demonstrate a significant effect on the graduate speakers’ use of the micro-markers and morphosyntactic markers for the Not Knowing Whether and Believing/Uncertain and the macro-markers and morphosyntactic markers for the Unknowing/Neither Certain nor Uncertain. It indicates that high-grade speakers are more sensitive to genre-based messages, though they use rather limited epistemic forms as low-grade speakers do. The findings suggest that English as a Second Language (ESL) oral instruction in China should be reformed and supplemented with diverse EMs to allow the speakers to take the epistemic stance they are comfortable with.

A discourse-pragmatic functional study of Chinese epistemic markers haoxiang “seem” and keneng “probably”

Abstract This study investigates the discourse-pragmatic functions of the epistemic markers haoxiang “seem” and keneng “probably” in natural conversations of Mandarin Chinese. By examining 107 cases of haoxiang and 152 cases of keneng in sequential contexts, it demonstrates that both haoxiang and keneng are hedge expressions showing the speaker’s attitude of lack of commitment to the truthfulness of their own utterance, which is often driven by an intersubjective motivation. As epistemic markers, haoxiang tends to mitigate informational certainty that is based on the speaker’s personal but vague experience, while keneng is often used to mitigate the assertiveness of the speaker’s personal speculation deduced from background knowledge, general knowledge or commonly accepted logic. Further, this study claims that both haoxiang and keneng often serve as politeness devices to mitigate various Face Threatening Acts (FTAs) such as disconfirmation, disagreement or negative assessment. In either case, haoxiang and keneng are not merely epistemic markers revealing the speaker’s subjective uncertainty, but also serve as politeness markers for the purpose of intersubjectivity, and their multiple discourse-pragmatic usages are rooted in their semantic meanings, respectively.

Disagreement, epistemic stance and contrastive marking in Catalan parliamentary debate

The aim of this paper is to offer a qualitative analysis of the relationship between disagreement, epistemic stance and contrast in parliamentary debate. To this end, all disagreeing moves including both an epistemic stance marker and a contrastive marker equivalent to but have been identified in a corpus of parliamentary debates in Catalan. The epistemic stance markers have been classified considering three main factors: type of marker (epistemic, evidential, attitudinal), epistemic scale (certainty-uncertainty) and position (either in the thesis or in the antithesis). The approach adopted encompasses interactional linguistics and pragmalinguistics as it considers how context variables, such as those related to genre, have an influence on the use and discourse effects of markers of epistemic stance and contrast. The main research questions are two: (i) how genre norms have an incidence on the expression of disagreement and the interpretation of epistemic stance markers, and (ii) how epistemicity and contrast interact with disagreement in parliamentary debate in order to reinforce the speakers' argumentation and block the opponent's opinion, as either questionable or shared knowledge. The analysis shows that disagreeing moves in the corpus establish a long-distance relation with a previous stretch of discourse and trigger a polyphonic strategy that can be expressed through a contrastive construction where epistemic markers qualify either the thesis or the antithesis. In both cases, the disagreeing argument (i.e. the antithesis) is thus reinforced not only when the epistemic stance marker expresses certainty but also when it expresses uncertainty.

The Italian epistemic marker mi sa [to me it knows] compared to so [I know], non so [I don't know], non so se [I don't know whether], credo [I believe], penso [I think

The two studies presented in this paper concern the Italian epistemic marker mi sa [lit. to me it knows], which seems to have no equivalent in other European languages and has received very little attention in the literature. No analysis of the occurrences of mi sa in contemporary spoken corpora can be found (first gap) as well as no investigation on the epistemic relationship between mi sa and (1) the other modal expressions that use the verb sapere [to know] in the first person singular of the simple present, i.e., so [I know], non so [I do not know], non so se [I do not know whether] as well as (2) its supposed synonyms credo [I believe] and penso [I think] (second gap). The two studies are closely intertwined, the first being an exploratory, qualitative pilot study for the second. Study 1 aims to fill the first gap through the analysis of the contemporary Italian spoken corpus KIParla. The quantitative and qualitative analyses revealed five types of occurrences (theoretically reducible to two main ones), the most numerous of which are ‘mi sa che + proposition’. Study 2 aims to fill the second gap through a questionnaire administered online. The quantitative and statistical results showed the epistemic relationships between the six markers: for the majority of the participants, in the epistemic continuum that goes from unknowledge to uncertainty and then to knowledge, (1) non so refers to unknowledge; non so se, mi sa, credo and penso refer to uncertainty; so refers to knowledge; (2) mi sa, credo, penso confirm to be synonyms; (3) non so se is evaluated as much more uncertain than mi sa, credo, penso. These four epistemic markers seem to occupy a different position along the uncertainty continuum ranging between two poles: doubt (high uncertainty) and belief (low uncertainty).

Egophoricity and evidentiality: Different categories, similar discourse functions

Abstract This article discusses how evidential and egophoric making is used to manage knowledge in interaction. To this end, it analyzes interactional data from Wutun (mixed Sinitic, Northwest China) and Upper Napo Kichwa (Quechuan, Ecuador). Wutun has an egophoric marking system, which, according to the definition of egophoricity, encodes involvement/lack of involvement in the described event. Upper Napo Kichwa has a set of evidentials, which, according to theory, encode the source of evidence for a given proposition. The two languages are typologically unrelated. However, when we look closely at how speakers of Wutun and Kichwa use epistemic markers, we discover functional similarities not predicted by the dominant definitions of epistemicity and evidentiality. In both languages, the use of the markers is conditioned by the interpersonal context of the interaction, and speakers use egophoric and evidential marking to signal their epistemic rights and responsibilities with respect to other speech-act participants.

Multimodal signals of high commitment in expert-to-expert contexts

The paper merges research in multimodality with studies in epistemics and discourse analysis, and analyses the ways in which expert speakers multimodally display their knowledge and their degree of commitment toward it. In a corpus of video abstracts where medical researchers orally illustrate their findings published in the British Medical Journal, body signals of high commitment – palm-up-open-hand, headshake, eyelid-closure, and shoulder shrug – are analyzed from a semantic and cognitive point of view as markers of high certainty and obviousness. The differences and relationships among body epistemic markers and their concomitant lexical affiliates, along with their semantic nuances, are illustrated in depth.

A study of linguistic manipulations of activating, seeking and creating common ground in intercultural business communication

Abstract Previous studies on common ground (CG, for short) have mainly focused on its definition and functions in various daily interactions. Few studies explore the linguistic manipulations of CG in cross-cultural business interactions. This paper aims to fill in this gap by examining how sellers and buyers manipulate linguistic actions of activating, seeking and creating CG to make a deal. This study instantiates and develops Kecskes’ (2013) CG model. Based on qualitative analysis of data collected from email interactions between Chinese sellers and Australian buyers, I find that (1) Interlocutors often activate their core CG through manipulating frequency markers such as “again”, and epistemic markers such as “I knew”, “you know”, “might”; (2) Interlocutors seek core CG and emergent CG by manipulating epistemic markers such as “I’m sure”; (3) Interlocutors often bring the third party or element into the communication to create emergent CG by using question markers such as “you see?”, imperative markers such as “Do you understand!”, and narrative markers like “I tell you” and “once” or “before”; (4) The interpersonal manipulations of CG construction contribute to business integrity and reliability because the more efforts interlocutors make to activate, seek, and create CG, the more clarified and acceptable their business relations become in business communication. For the purpose of validating what I have found, I conduct a quantitative study of linguistic means of constructing CG in the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (SBCSAE), and summarize the typical linguistic means of activating, seeking, and creating CG in various settings.