Communicating Epistemic Stance: How Speech and Gesture Patterns Reflect Epistemicity and Evidentiality

Abstract

This study investigates how epistemic stance is encoded and perceived in face-to-face communication when language is regarded as comprised by speech and gesture. Two studies were conducted with this goal in mind. The first study consisted of a production task in which participants performed opinion reports. Results showed that speakers communicate epistemic stance both verbally and non-verbally, and that specific prosodic and gestural patterns are used to express different epistemic and evidential meanings. The second study consisted of a rating task in which listeners rated the degree of certainty expressed by the opinion reports. Results showed that the number of gestural high certainty markers used by a speaker was a good predictor of the perception of epistemic high certainty. We thus claim that prosodic and gestural markers can be regarded as overt manifestations of epistemicity and evidentiality, and they appear to be especially effective in the communication of epistemic stance.

Acknowledgments

We thank participants of the Nature of Evidentiality 2012 and Modality, Corpus, Discourse meetings, especially Johan Rooryk, Monica Lau, Margaret Speas, Eric Melac, Carita Paradis, and Jan Nuyts, for their helpful comments. We also acknowledge the assistance given by Maria Dolors Cañada in using the Atlas.ti procedure to code our data and by Núria Esteve Gibert for her participation in the inter-reliability test.

Notes

A preliminary version of this article was presented at The Nature of Evidentiality 2012 (Leiden, June 13–15, 2012), and Modality, Corpus, Discourse (Lund, June 7–8, 2012).

¹ The different positions on this subject are exemplified in Chafe and Nichols (1986), Palmer (1986), van der Auwera and Plungian (1998), de Haan (2001, 2005), Aikhenvald (2004), Nuyts (2001, 2005), Dendale and Tasmowski (2001), Hoye (2008), Mushin (2001), Marín Arrese (2004, 2011), Bednarek (2006), Du Bois (2007), Hoye (2008), and Cornillie (2009), among others.

² Other pragmatic meanings that gestural and prosodic patterns have been found to convey include contrastive focus (e.g., Dohen & Loevenbruck, 2009; Krahmer, Ruttkay, Swerts, & Wesselink, 2002; Swerts & Krahmer, 2004, 2008), interrogativity (Borràs-Comes & Prieto, 2011; House, 2002; Srinivasan & Massaro, 2003; Swerts & Krahmer, 2004, 2005, 2008), and mirativity (Crespo-Sendra, Kaland, Swerts, & Prieto, 2013).

³ Participants gave their informed consent to participate in accordance with EU regulations, Spanish law, and the regulations of the host university.

⁴ Admittedly, having given the listener instructions not to intervene verbally while listening to the opinion report indeed reduced the spontaneity of the communication, but on the other hand this offered the methodological advantage of reducing the number of factors to be taken into consideration in the latter analysis. Crucially, it controlled for the potential effects of turn-taking, whose importance is well known in the Conversation Analysis literature.

⁵ In both the listener and the speaker versions of the Likert scales, the sentences referred to the speaker, so that for the speaker it read I think it works, but for the listener it read He/she thinks it works.

⁶ We decided to abide strictly by McNeill's (1992) labeling rules. We therefore labeled motion, too. According to McNeill's labeling system, motion is described in two dimensions: direction of motion and location in the space where motion is articulated. The description of motion, especially direction, turned out to be the most difficult to label, because movements can have several and complex trajectories. The location in space where the movement is articulated is defined according to McNeill (1992, p. 378) along the center/periphery, left/right, inner/outer, or upper/lower dimensions. Subsequent analyses demonstrated that this aspect of gesture was not especially meaningful in the expression of epistemic stance.

⁷ As it is common in studies about prosody and/or gesture, the aim of the reliability test is not to assess the reliability of a single transcriber but of the transcription system in general (Breen et al., 2012; Escudero et al., 2012; Grice et al., 1996; Jun et al., 2000; Petrelli et al., 1994; Syrdal & McGory, 2000; Yoon et al., 2004).

⁸ A total of five instances of simultaneous gestural and textual markers of evidentiality were found in our database. Because of this low number of occurrences, we were not able to carry out a GLMM analysis to test for the significance of these patterns.

⁹ As suggested by one of the reviewers, if one were to rely exclusively on textual marking, this sentence might be interpreted as conveying LC because the speaker might be implying that “they” (i.e., someone else, not me) says it works. It could thus easily communicate LC to a hearer because the speaker is setting up a “me/them” situation in which the speaker is distancing him- or herself from the assertion about the efficacy of aspirin/acupuncture. Nevertheless, the examples presented in Figure 13 show that a similar sentence from a textual perspective can be interpreted either as LC or as HC, depending on the gestural and prosodic realization of the sentences (see also Figure 1 for an example of a similar minimal pair).

¹⁰ Figure 4 offers examples of the L+H^* !H% and H+L^* L% nuclear configurations.

¹¹ We acknowledge a point raised by one of our reviewers: Even though the strategy used in this study of isolating discourse into its component parts allows us to get a complete picture of what is happening in multimodal discourse, we should be aware that some information might be lost when we reduce the whole to its parts in this way.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (research grants BFU2012-31995 and FFI2011-25755) and by a grant awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya (2014SGR-925).