Book on epistemic stance

[Elise Kärkkäinen]

Dear Funknetters,

I would like to bring to your attention my book, published at the end of 
last year.

Thanks,
Elise Kärkkäinen

Epistemic Stance in English Conversation
A description of its interactional functions,
with a focus on I think

Elise Kärkkäinen
University of Oulu

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.

John Benjamins Publishing Company
Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 115
2003. Hb xii, 213 pp. 90 272 5357 9 EUR 85.00
1 58811 444 9 USD 85.00

Table of contents
Acknowledgements
List of tables
1. Introduction
2. Expression of epistemic stance: Preliminaries
3. The intonation unit as analytical unit
4. Routinization of stance marking at the linguistic and interactional level
5. Stance-taking as an interactive activity: The case of I think
6. Concluding remarks
References; Appendix; Name index; Subject index

Elise Kärkkäinen
PhD, Academy Research Fellow
Department of English
Box 1000
FIN - 90014 University of Oulu
FINLAND