The article focuses on the deployment of hypothetical talk in the CANBEC and CCI corpora of business meetings and examines its use as a discursive tool for communicating stance in encounters where participants represent (potentially) incompatible positions. Through the use of hypothetical talk, interactants signal the potential for agreement and resolution by testing the other participants’ position and their preparedness to shift their view. It is argued that although talk introduced to the meeting may be hypothetical, the stance communicated is real. The analysis provides insights into actions applied to resolve impasse or conflict situations, particularly through the rhetorical move of formulating. Formulating aims to resolve or summarize talk at a particular instance in time. The act of formulating requires an evaluative step on the part of the participants in order to consider their contributions or their opposition to the formulation. It is, therefore, of interest to examine how talk that is known to be hypothetical – hence essentially unreal, speculative, potentially untrue or even counterfactual – can be allowed to feature in meetings discourse and to influence a meeting’s outcome. Two theoretical models were applied to understand this – Du Bois’s (2007) “stance triangle” and Hunston’s (1989, 1994, 2011) three functions of evaluation. These offered a new perspective on the role of hypothetical talk in business meetings, where, as the results demonstrate, hypothetical talk is used to signal stance, test that of the other participants, and advance the speakers’ goals. By integrating the two models and applying them in order to understand how hypothetical talk is formulated in business meetings, it was possible to conceptualize the process through which meeting participants evaluate and act upon talk, by making “real life decisions” upon information which has initially been introduced to the meeting as hypothetical.

The study aims to emphasize how lexical particles and grammatical constructions express indirect evidentiality and the speaker’s stance in Romanian. As with the other Romance languages, Romanian contains the grammatical means to express the speaker’s knowledge source, such as the Conditional Mood, a prototypical quotative/reportative evidential marking, or the Subjunctive and the Future, which, together with the Presumptive, a modal form specific to this linguistic system alone, function as markers of indirect evidentiality of the inferential type. Additionally, each of these forms can be augmented by a rich lexicalized system of adverbs and particles. For example, pesemne [‘probably’, literally on + signs], poate [‘may be’; a regressive form from the third person singular of the verb a se putea < Late Latin *potere (Classical Latin posse)], probabil [‘probably’, < a borrowing from the Fr. probable and the Lat. probabilis] are lexical particles of inferential evidentiality, and cică [‘supposedly’; a lexicalized form from the expression [se zi]ce că – literally it said that], pasămite [‘apparently’ whose etymology is controversial] and chipurile [‘supposedly’; a borrowing from Hungarian, literally ‘faces’] are means of quotative/reportative evidentiality. This lexical and grammatical system marking indirect evidentiality will be analyzed with respect to their grammaticalization processes, but also addressing the discursive behaviour.

The discursive practices of individual academic disciplines differ in many ways, which is why numerous studies of academic discourse adopt cross-disciplinary perspectives to explore the character and extent of those differences. Less attention has, however, been given to interdisciplinary discourses which incorporate the findings and/or research methods from a number of disciplines. This paper focuses on the discourse of one of the new critical interdisciplinarities: posthumanism. More specifically, it examines how posthumanist discourse integrates knowledge produced by the soft and hard sciences (as well as other sources) to build its perspective on animals and their relations with humans. Using Martin and White’s (2005) appraisal framework to study knowledge claims collected from selected scholarly monographs adopting a posthumanist perspective, this study demonstrates that posthumanist claims referring to biological knowledge and experiential evidence tend to contain neutral, positive and endorsing formulations, while the knowledge from the soft sciences is reported in more critical ways, which is consistent with the aims of critical interdisciplinarities, i.e. questioning and transforming the dominant knowledge structure within different disciplines. Additionally, this paper provides evidence of the importance of popular science within interdisciplinary research in the humanities. It also sheds some light on the rhetorical practices within the scholarly monograph as a genre, particularly concerning the relative flexibility of its discursive conventions in comparison with those expected from a research article.

This paper examines the relation between hypotheticals and epistemic stance in jury trials, and it reveals how hypothetically framed questions (HQs) are used in cross- examination to construct “the admissible truth” (Gutheil et al. 2003) which is then turned into evidence. It looks at a selection of interactional exchanges identified in the transcripts and video recordings which document two days of expert witness cross- examination in two high-profile criminal cases. In the study, two approaches to data analysis were combined: a bottom-up approach focusing on markers of HQs offering “points of entry” into discourse through a corpus-assisted analysis and a top-down approach looking at cross-examination as a complex communicative event, providing a more holistic view of the interactional context in which HQs are used. The paper explains the role which such questions play in the positioning of opposing knowledge claims, as well as discusses the effect they create in hostile interaction with expert witnesses. As is revealed, HQs are used to elicit the witness’s assessments of alternative scenarios of past events and causal links involving the facts of the case; to elicit the witness’s assessments of general hypothetical scenarios not involving the facts of the case, or to undermine the validity of the witness’s method of analysis. In sum, the paper explains how the use of HQs aids cross-examining attorneys in deconstructing unfavourable testimony and constructing the “legal truth” which supports their narrative.