28.96, Diss: Epistemic Stance Markers and the Function of I Don’t Know in the Talk of Persons with Dementia and Children with Autism

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-28-96. Thu Jan 05 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.96, Diss: Epistemic Stance Markers and the Function of I Don’t Know in the Talk of Persons with Dementia and Children with Autism

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Date: Thu, 05 Jan 2017 14:33:44
From: Trini Stickle [trini.stickle at wku.edu]
Subject: Epistemic Stance Markers and the Function of I Don’t Know in the Talk of Persons with Dementia and Children with Autism

 
Institution: University of Wisconsin Madison 
Program: Department of English 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2015 

Author: Trini G. Stickle

Dissertation Title: Epistemic Stance Markers and the Function of I Don’t Know
in the Talk of Persons with Dementia and Children with
Autism 

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics
                     Cognitive Science
                     Sociolinguistics
                     Syntax

Subject Language(s): English (eng)


Dissertation Director(s):
Cecilia E Ford
Anja Wanner
Thomas Purnell
Douglas W Maynard
Molly Carnes

Dissertation Abstract:

This study examines epistemic stance marker use in the talk of persons with
mid to late stages of dementia of the probable Alzheimer’s type and in
children with autism. I report the forms and frequencies of all epistemic
stance markers used in naturally-occurring conversations between 20 persons
with dementia and their non-impaired co-participants, and I compare the
resultant 25-conversation corpus of 33,000 words, derived from 4 hours, 51
minutes of audio, to existing corpora. Overall, persons with dementia use a
common variety of epistemic stance markers with frequencies comparable to
other corpora, to include the conversation register of the Longman Grammar of
Spoken and Written English. Moreover, conversation analysis shows that persons
with dementia use I don’t know, the most frequent stance marker, much the same
way as non-impaired persons: to display epistemic stance but also to manage
sequences of talk (i.e. closing or initiating topics) and to manage preference
(e.g., disagreeing with co-participants).

A separate conversation analysis of naturally-elicited talk by seven children,
ages 6-13, undergoing clinical evaluation for autism spectrum disorder focuses
on their use of I don’t know in response to emotion-related questions from the
Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS-II). While some of these children
do use I don’t know to display epistemic stance and to signal more talk is
forthcoming, more often they use I don’t know to, in effect, resist providing
information requested by the clinicians. In a few of these cases, I observe
that the syntactic interrogatory construction “What about/How about” may
unintentionally elicit I don’t know utterances relative to that of other
question formulations.

Two additional observations likely have import to conversation, in general. I
show that American English speakers, like British speakers reported elsewhere,
also use I don’t know in response to compliments to minimize a
co-participant's positive assessment and to avoid self-praise. I also look at
a mechanism that is at work within sequence management in which a person with
dementia uses a complement-taking I don’t know utterance as a first-pair part
to initiate an action that I call a “wondering”.




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