Guided by the methodology of conversation analysis (CA), this book explores how participants in Mandarin conversation display stance in the unfolding development of action and interaction, and, in particular, how this is accomplished through the use of two Mandarin final particles. Through a close examination of the sequential environments of these two particles and the interactional work accomplished by their use, the research presented in this book seeks to demonstrate how a participant-oriented, action-based micro approach to data can help us gain analytic leverage in understanding the functions and meanings of these particles – an area which has long posed a challenge to Chinese linguists. On the other hand, in utilizing a CA-based framework applied to Mandarin, this study also seeks to contribute to conversation analytic research by revealing previously uninvestigated language-specific phenomena while at the same time showing how talk-in-interaction in a non-western language, i.e., Mandarin, can also display the same striking systematicity and orderliness as observed in many western languages. As one of the pioneering CA studies of Mandarin, this book will be of interest to researchers in Chinese linguistics and conversation analysis, as well as those in fields which touch upon the relationships between languages and cultures.

Listeners are usually considered recipients in conversational interaction, whose main activity is to take in messages from other speakers. In this view, the listening activity is separate from speaking. Another view is that listeners and speakers are equal co-participants in conversations who construct the talk together. In support of this latter view, one finds a group of vocalisations which are quintessentially listener talk — little conversational objects such as uh-huh, oh, mm, yeah, right and mm-hm. These utterances do not have meanings in a conventional dictionary sense, but are nevertheless loaded with complex and subtle information about the stance listeners take to what they are hearing, information that is gleaned not only from their phonetic form, but also from their complex prosodic shape and their placement and timing within the flow of talk. This book summarises eight of these objects, and explores one, mm, in depth.

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 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 book presents one of the first attempts at developing a precise, grammatically rooted, theory of conversation motivated by data from real conversations. The theory has descriptive reach from the micro-conversational -- e.g. self-repair at the word level -- to macro-level phenomena such as multi-party conversation and the characterization of distinct conversational genres. It draws on extensive corpus studies of the British National Corpus, on evidence from language acquisition, and on computer simulations of language evolution. The theory provides accounts of the opening, middle game, and closing stages of conversation. It also offers a new perspective on traditional semantic concerns such as quantification and anaphora. The Interactive Stance challenges orthodox views of grammar by arguing that, unless we wish to exclude from analysis a large body of frequently occurring words and constructions, the right way to construe grammar is as a system that characterizes types of talk in interaction.

This book is about moral talk in contemporary British political discourse, drawing on speeches, debates and radio phone-ins. Using a critical sociolinguistic approach, Spencer-Bennett explores the language people use to communicate moral judgement and highlights the relations between the things that people say, the contexts in which they are said and the circulating ideologies about meaning and morality. This is key reading for students and scholars studying language, politics and critical discourse analysis, within linguistics and anthropology.

Stancetaking-or speaker positioning-is central to communication. This collected volume explores stancetaking as a sociolinguistic phenomenon, looking at how speakers use language to position themselves and others and exploring how speakers and writers make use of and sometimes transform the meaning of sociolinguistic variables in their acts of stance.