Magdalena Szczyrbak

This paper examines the ways in which New Zealand and Polish government officials communicated the easing of COVID restrictions to the general public. The study aimed to identify legitimising strategies used to justify the lifting of restrictions and related measures, and to establish how agency and responsibility were discursively constructed in the subgenre of political press conference in two different socio-political settings. Informed by the notions of legitimisation (Chilton 2004), speaker commitment and stance (Marín Arrese 2011, 2015, 2021), the research looked into the linguistic marking of effective stance (deonticity, assessments, attitudinals and directives) and epistemic stance (epistemic modality, truth-factual validity as well as experiential, cognitive and communicative stance), considering both the subjectivity/intersubjectivity dimension and the explicitness/implicitness of the speaker’s role. In addition, the study considered the key discursive strategies used to (de)construct agency in the discourses of NZ and Polish policymakers seen as proponents of divergent public health policies. As the findings indicate, the Polish officials conveyed chiefly experiential stance and projected less involvement, whereas the NZ Prime Minister favoured cognitive stance and deonticity as well as direct appeals to the audience. The analysis shows that the speaker’s (dis)identification with the respective policy finds reflection in the varying degrees of speaker commitment and the (de)construction of agency.

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.

This article presents the results of a corpus-assisted discourse study into the use of the diminutive marker little in an adversarial trial. It explores the recurrent patterns and the evaluative meanings associated with the use of little, and furthermore looks at the broader interactional context in which these patterns and meanings are found. Drawing on the concepts of stance (du Bois 2007), evaluation (Hunston 1994) and semantic prosody (Louw 1993), it demonstrates how interactants in the courtroom setting lay claim to epistemic priority by stressing the relevance of their own testimony while discrediting the opponent and diminishing the importance of unwanted evidence. The analysis also shows that patterns with little are linked to politeness and mitigation, and that they soften the austerity of communication. The data seem to suggest as well that the evaluative uses of little are more common in references to the primary reality of the courtroom than in references to the out-of-the-courtroom reality, in the case of which denotative meanings prevail. Most importantly, however, the study reveals that despite the formality of courtroom interaction, analytic diminutives with little are a frequent interactional device and, further, that their polarities depend on interplay with other discourse elements as well as the interpersonal goals that the speakers are trying to achieve.

This article presents the results of a corpus-assisted discourse study into the use of the diminutive marker little in an adversarial trial. It explores the recurrent patterns and the evaluative meanings associated with the use of little, and furthermore looks at the broader interactional context in which these patterns and meanings are found. Drawing on the concepts of stance (du Bois 2007), evaluation (Hunston 1994) and semantic prosody (Louw 1993), it demonstrates how interactants in the courtroom setting lay claim to epistemic priority by stressing the relevance of their own testimony while discrediting the opponent and diminishing the importance of unwanted evidence. The analysis also shows that patterns with little are linked to politeness and mitigation, and that they soften the austerity of communication. The data seem to suggest as well that the evaluative uses of little are more common in references to the primary reality of the courtroom than in references to the out-of-the-courtroom reality, in the case of which denotative meanings prevail. Most importantly, however, the study reveals that despite the formality of courtroom interaction, analytic diminutives with little are a frequent interactional device and, further, that their polarities depend on interplay with other discourse elements as well as the interpersonal goals that the speakers are trying to achieve.

The article aims to contribute a genre-based description of the realisation of Concession in EU judicial discourse. The analysis has been carried out on a corpus of judgments issued by the EU court of last instance, i.e. the European Court of Justice with the intention to identify the patterns and markers of Concession in judicial argumentation. In the analysis the author used the concept of Concession developed by Couper-Kuhlen and Thompson (1999, 2000) following the assumptions underlying Interactional Linguistics. The results revealed the most frequent patterns and markers of Concession in judicial discourse. At the same time, they led the author to the conclusion that the interactional model of Concession developed for analysing the spoken mode of language may successfully be applied in the examination of written data.

This article reports on a study into epistemic strategies used in the trial on the 2010 Polish Air Force Tu-154 air crash which took the lives of many high-ranking Polish officials including the President of Poland. It follows the KUB model proposed by Bongelli and Zuczkowski (2008), in which three epistemic stances are distinguished: Knowing, Unknowing and Believing. Taking into account the political context of the trial, the study focuses on the ways in which the witness, Poland’s former Prime Minister Donald Tusk, communicates his knowledge (certainty), unknowledge (neither certainty nor uncertainty) and belief (uncertainty). As the data reveal, when referring to the circumstances of the crash itself, the witness most willingly communicates unknowledge and belief while his declarations of certitude (knowledge) concern mostly procedural matters which are not directly related to the crash. As regards the explicit marking of (un)knowledge with the verb wiedzieć (‘know’), both wiem (‘I know’) and nie wiem (‘I don’t know’) are used rather sparingly. By contrast, phrases including references to the witness’s memory (e.g. to, co mam w pamięci [‘what I can remember’]) – marking either unknowledge or limited/uncertain knowledge (belief) – resurface as the witness’s preferred strategy. The data also demonstrate frequent co-occurrences of ‘knowing,’ ‘unknowing’ and ‘believing’ markers, reducing the overall degree of certainty communicated by the speaker. In sum, the study reveals how Poland’s former Prime Minister skillfully avoids unequivocal or categorical answersand conveys a low degree of certainty in his testimony.

Drawing on interactional approaches to comment clauses (Stenström 1994; Povolná 2010), the paper reveals the discourse functions of I mean (Part 1) and you know (Part 2) in the context of police interviews. More specifically, taking into account the socio-pragmatic setting of police-suspect interaction, it highlights the context-dependence and the multifunctionality of these markers based on data from two police interview transcripts. Thus, following the spirit of the study by Fox Tree and Schrock (2002), Part 1 of the analysis demonstrates that while the primary role of I mean is that of “forewarning upcoming adjustments” (Schiffrin 1987), the marker performs interpersonal, turn management, repairing, monitoring and organizing functions. This being the case, the study examines the potential of I meanm to modify the ongoing interaction and stresses its contribution to the coherence of the interviewees’ narratives. Attention is also drawn to the syntactic environment in which I mean occurs as well as to listener responses to I mean and I mean-introduced ideas. Finally, the discussion touches upon the issue of power relations and shows the role which I mean plays in the linguistic manifestation of power in an institutional setting.

Intended as a study of stancetaking patterns in judicial opinions, this article aims at contributing to stance-related investigations of specialist discourse. For this purpose, it builds on the work of stance researchers and interactional linguists as well as attempts to apply their concepts in an examination of written data. In particular, the analysis is informed by Du Bois’s interactional concept of stance and the two related notions of epistemicity and evidentiality. It also follows Chilton’s discourse space theory in what is proposed as a stance analysis framework intended to aid researchers in categorising individual stance acts. The study draws on data from a theme-focused corpus of US Supreme Court opinions dealing with capital punishment.

The action-oriented concept of Concession seems not to have received any attention by discourse analysts studying Polish conversational data. It is therefore the aim of this article to demonstrate the usefulness of this analytical model in discourse-pragmatic studies of spoken Polish and to open a forum for discussion on how the Concessive relation – one of the organising principles of spoken interaction and text-forming strategies in written communication – is realised by Polish speakers in various communicative settings. Towards this end, the study focuses on common ways of marking acknowledgments and rebuttals attested by real-life data (private conversations and radio talk) and it demonstrates patterns which are realised by speakers negotiating meaning in informal and semi-formal contexts. The analysis clearly shows that, trying to mitigate the possible negative effect of disagreement, Poles usually follow the tak, ale schema, even though disagreement-agreement patterns are attested as well. As regards the type of marking, it is found that while countermoves are associated predominantly with ale, acknowledgments are cued by modal adverbs, evaluative adjectives, deixis, prosody and repetition. Finally, it is concluded that application of the interactional model of Concession in contrastive analyses of Polish and English can not only further discourse analysts’ understanding of the organisation of spoken interaction, but it can also have a bearing on language instruction and acquisition.

Akin to stereotype, gossip is a transmission mechanism which fulfils persuasive functions, but which does not seek to answer questions about the genuineness of the transmitted information or its anchoring in reality other than the reality created during the communication process (Wagner 2006: 39). Such is also the case with online celebrity gossip, in the case of which writers recruit various strategies to vary the epistemic strength of their assessments and to claim or disclaim responsibility for the accuracy of the provided information. Given the foregoing, basing on English and Polish linguistic material, this article investigates elements of epistemological positioning (Bednarek 2006) which underlie the construction of online celebrity news in two languages lacking grammaticalised systems of evidentiality. To this end, the study outlines the main strategies related to the communication of knowledge and identifies the resources used for the construal of (un)certainty in this type of discourse. The sources of evidence analysed in the study include: ‘Perception/Inference,’ ‘General knowledge,’ ‘Proof,’ ‘Obviousness,’ ‘Unspecified,’ ‘Hearsay’ and ‘Mindsay,’ based on which diverse English and Polish EP markers are discussed. As the findings expose, rather than offer solid evidence, the authors of both sets of articles rely chiefly on perception, inference and hearsay, showing little epistemic commitment and decreasing the informative value of their reports.