Speaker stance and the progressive in courtroom interaction
Magdalena Szczyrbak
Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
Abstract
While advocates of the narrow-scope approach to pragmatics are concerned with a limited set of phenomena including speech acts, politeness and deixis, those who adopt a wider perspective consider various facets of “context” to explain how language receives its social and interactional meanings (Herring et al. 2013: 6). Put differently, “border-seekers”, to use Ariel’s (2010) wording, restrict their analyses to what they call pragmatic rather than semantic or syntactic phenomena, whereas “problem-solvers” first identify a problem and then choose a particular perspective on their object of study (Herring et al. 2013: 6). Along the same lines, adopting various points of view, discourse analysts examine a wide array of interactional phenomena, tying utterances up with the background of the participants and the communicative action they perform.
One problem area which has received considerable attention, and which has been linked to a number of interactional practices, is the discursive construction of subjectivity, or, more precisely, speaker stance. The notion of stance, it must be admitted, has been defined in a variety of ways. For instance, Biber et al. (1999: 966) equate stance with “personal feelings, attitudes, value judgments, or assessments” and, consequently, they associate it with a set of lexical markers. CADS advocates, in turn, prefer to distinguish stance, i.e. indications of how the author communicates with the reader, from evaluation, i.e. attribution of a value to an entity, whether inside or outside a text (Hunston 2011). Finally, conversation analysts and interactional linguists focus on the dialogic co-construction of stance, as a form of social action, which entails the mutual positioning of subjects and the evaluation of objects (du Bois 2007). Despite the different analytical tools they employ, both CADS and CA scholars share the belief that stance is not tied to individual linguistic devices, but rather that it is cumulative or dispersed in discourse, be it in the form of lexico-grammatical patterns interwoven into written texts or interactional schemata spread over sequences of turns-at-talk. Thus, it may be argued, the repertoire of stancetaking strategies is almost infinite, including obvious lexical markers, recurrent phraseological patterns and less explicit ways of intersubjective positioning.
The progressive construction in English is an example of a not-so-obvious stancetaking resource, even though apart from its aspectual meaning, it may signal the speaker’s point of view as well as their emotional involvement or interpretation of the ongoing communication. In fact, the interpretive (or experiential) progressive – often considered secondary compared with the aspectual progressive – has been the subject of several studies (e.g. Wright 1995; Levin 2013), some of which address its role in courtroom interaction (e.g. Szczyrbak 2018). Likewise, the co-occurrence of the progressive with selected verbs of speaking has been identified as a significant factor in hostile examination (Taylor 2009), showing a preference for the present tense and, in particular, the present progressive (Johnson 2014).
Combining insights from previous research, in my talk, I will focus on the role that the progressive construction plays in signalling the speaker’s stance in a competitive interactional setting. Using data from a high-profile libel case, I will explain how participants in the trial make use of the progressive to mark their subjective assessments. In particular, I will use the results of a corpus-based study to provide a qualitative reading of several patterns with verba dicendi (say, talk, tell, speak) and – for comparison purposes – with private verbs (think, hope, want, wonder), the latter of which typically resist the progressive form. I will also look at the interplay of the progressive of selected verbs with person deixis (first- and second-person pronouns) and the speaker’s interactional status (judge vs counsel vs claimant). As the preliminary findings indicate, the present progressive of verba dicendi (e.g. you are saying (that); I (am) not saying; we are talking (about)) tends to have an explanatory function and it is linked to epistemic stance and the negotiation of epistemic priority (‘my vs your account’ schema). On the other hand, the present/past progressive of private verbs, which is much less frequent, stresses temporariness or tentativeness and thus reduces the degree of imposition (as, e.g., in I am thinking, I was hoping, I am just wanting).
In sum, as the courtroom data demonstrate, the progressive form of verba dicendi (and, in particular, of the verb say) plays a key role in the discursive construction of speaker stance and, as a result, it is pragmatically relevant in the process of making evidence. The progressive of private verbs, in turn, though marginal, instantiates hedged modes of expression and the tendency for meanings to be based in speakers’ subjective attitudes.
Keywords: courtroom talk, progressive, stance, subjectivity, verba dicendi, private verbs
References
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. & Finegan, E., 1999. The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.
du Bois, J.W., 2007. The stance triangle. In R. Englebretson, ed. Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 139–182.
Herring, S.C., Stein, D. & Virtanen, T. (eds). 2013. Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter.
Hunston, S., 2011. Corpus Approaches to Evaluation. Phraseology and Evaluative Language. New York/London: Routledge.