Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 1184–1200 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma
I think and I don’t know in English as lingua franca and native English discourse Nicole Baumgarten a,*, Juliane House b,1 a
University of Southern Denmark, Institute of Business Communication and Information Science, Alsion 2, 6400 Sønderborg, Denmark b Hamburg University, Institute of General and Applied Linguistics, Von-Melle-Park 6, 20146 Hamburg, Germany Received 19 January 2009; received in revised form 17 September 2009; accepted 19 September 2009
Abstract The article investigates the high-frequency collocations I think and I don’t know as markers of stance-taking by native and nonnative speakers of English in L1 and English as lingua franca (ELF) interaction. The study starts from the assumption that the expression of stance through I think and I don’t know constructions differs in ELF and L1 English discourse because of the specific nature of the ELF communicative situation, i.e. the speakers’ different L1s and the characteristics of their respective learner varieties in interaction may evoke ELF-specific patterns of stance-taking. The analysis of I think and I don’t know and their co-occurrences with syntactic and discourse phenomena in a corpus of elicited conversation data shows that while these collocations are among the most frequent stancemarking devices in both the English L1 and the ELF data, they show almost complementary distributions and only partially overlapping functional profiles. # 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Stance; L1 English interaction; English as a lingua franca interaction; First person pronouns; I think; I don’t know
1. Introduction This article explores stance-taking in discourse by native and non-native speakers of English in L1–L1 and L2–L2 interactions from the point of view of high-frequency I + verb collocations and their function of encoding the speaker’s perceptions, feelings, opinions and evaluations in discourse. The general research question addressed here is whether the linguistic expression of stance through I think and I don’t know is different in interactions in which speakers of different L1s use English as a lingua from comparable L1 English interactions—and thus possibly typical of English lingua franca (ELF) interaction. It has been suggested that ELF discourse, i.e. the increasingly frequent occasions on which speakers with different L1s communicate in their L2 English, is primarily oriented towards content rather than towards the interpersonal dimension of communication (Firth, 1996; Thompson, 2006). That is, in contrast to L1 English communication, ELF communication is predominantly transactional and task-oriented; speakers are focused on the expression of ideational meaning, including the handling of miscommunication. The linguistic construction of a particular speaker persona or speaker identity in their discourse and of acts of ‘socializing’ with their interlocutor, i.e. interpersonal meaningmaking, appears comparatively less relevant. * Corresponding author. Tel.: +45 6550 1255; fax: +45 6550 1093. E-mail addresses:
[email protected] (N. Baumgarten),
[email protected] (J. House). 1 Tel.: +49 40 428385394; fax: +49 40 428385391. 0378-2166/$ – see front matter # 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2009.09.018
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In contrast, Ochs (1993) argues that the expression of sanctioned ‘social stances’ and ‘social acts’ is fundamental to the projection of viable speaker identities and to an adequate positioning of the speakers’ self in the discourse, and these are seen as central tasks to be mastered if one is to be admitted to any professional or non-professional discourse community or other communities of practice. Similarly, in her study on the structural patterns of subjectivity in spoken L1 English, Scheibman (2002) states that the most common feature of spoken discourse are subject–predicate combinations which allow the speakers to personalize their talk, to mark attitude, evaluation and empathy. Particularly significant in this connection is the nominative first person pronoun. It is the most basic and prototypical source of subjectivity in language because it always explicitly refers to the speaker and thereby automatically introduces an explicit argumentative perspective to the discourse. Thus, speakers of English, including L2 speakers, can hardly NOT express personal stance, and it appears unlikely that (inter-)subjective and discourse-pragmatic meanings which are evoked by subject–predicate combinations should play a lesser role in all-L2 interaction. However, they may well play a different role in ELF and L1 English talk. In ELF communication, speakers of different L1s with potentially differing conventionalized patterns of stance-marking and stance-taking and differently diversified L2 varieties of English interact. The linguistic expression of feelings, opinions and evaluations is inherently bound up with considerations of the speaker’s and the interlocutors’ face and the degrees of politeness appropriate in the communicative encounter. These, in turn, are informed by culture- and community-specific communicative conventions. Such conventions regulate, for each speaker, the linguistic pattern and the frequency of stance-taking in discourse, which may or may not coincide with the communicative styles conventionalized in comparable English L1 interactions. In ELF communication, the individual L2 speakers cannot possibly be aware of the L1-related stylistic preferences of their English L2 interlocutors. In comparison with L1 speakers, participants in ELF interaction operate on a much smaller common ground of mutually expectable communicative behaviour. The first question, therefore, is whether there are differences in stance-taking between L1 and ELF interactants. If this were the case, the second question would be whether these differences can be described as a universal feature of lingua franca interaction, i.e. invariably caused by the lingua franca situation, or whether they are, on each occasion, the individual outcome of the interaction of different L2 varieties of English, which are influenced by the speakers’ L1s and L1-specific communicative styles. 2. Stance-taking and the first person pronoun ‘I’ Benveniste, who introduced the notion of subjectivity in language, claims that it is especially the grammatical category of pronouns which enables the expressive capacity of speakers, i.e. their ability to talk about themselves by positing themselves as the grammatical subject of the utterance and the topic of the talk: ‘‘I signifies ‘the person who is uttering the present instance of the discourse containing I’’’ (Benveniste, 1966/1971:218). The proposition expressed in connection with ‘I’ will always be directly related to the person of the speaker by the hearer(s). Therefore, I + predicate combinations in discourse are self-revelations. They are the prime sites of the speakers’ self-stylization. The concept of stance-taking which underlies the present investigation is based on Biber et al. (1999) and Conrad and Biber (2001). The speaker’s stance is his or her attitude towards what he or she is saying (Conrad and Biber, 2001). That is, in addition to the propositional content speakers also express – very often in the same utterance – meanings which convey their personal feelings, attitudes, value judgements and assessments. The expression of stance is associated with a number of specific linguistic structures, which encompass grammatical as well as lexical means. In connection with first person pronouns, four options exist which overtly attribute a stance to the speaker: complement clause constructions (1), so-called comment clauses (utterance-final finite adverbial clauses) (2), lexical verbs (3), and adjectives (4) with evaluative meaning. (1) (2) (3) (4)
I hope that I got it right. I got it right, I guess. I love TV drama. I’m surprised.
In the field of stance, research has focused on register or genre-specific patterns of stance-taking, on differences in stance-taking in spoken and written registers, the diachronic development of the linguistic marking of stance in texts (Biber, 2004; Biber and Finegan, 1994; Hyland, 1999, 2005; Ka¨rkka¨inen, 2003), language-specific patterns of stancemarking (Biber, 1995) and the differences in stance-taking between native and non-native speakers of English
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(Hyland, 2004; Mauranen, 1993). The latter investigations have almost exclusively focused on written discourse, in particular written academic prose. For spoken discourse, it has been observed that even advanced L2 speakers in L1–L2 communication in Japanese have difficulties in the situationally and pragmatically appropriate use of complement clause constructions as stance-taking devices (Hohenstein, 2004). On the whole, however, with few exceptions, research has addressed stance-marking and stance-taking in L1 American and British English. From the area of learner language research, which, in general, does not have an explicit focus on stance, finally, comes evidence that advanced learners show non-target-like use of stance-marking devices such as epistemic modal verbs and epistemic predicates in L2 writing (Altenberg, 1997; Ringbom, 1998; Aijmer, 2001; Maden-Weinberger, 2008). As mentioned above, the first person pronoun is the most basic expression of speaker subjectivity in English. It is also the most explicit type of anchoring the speaker’s stance in discourse. But while all known languages have the category of ‘first person’, the actual use of the first person pronoun in discourse is more often than not highly constrained. These constraints may also affect L2 performance. Lotfi and Shahrokhi (2005), for example, have shown that Persian L2 speakers of English use fewer I + predicate combinations for encoding their subjective perspective in discourse than L1 English speakers in comparable situations. In Persian, a pro-drop language, the separate first person singular pronoun in subject position is only used when the speaker wishes to thematize the subject, i.e. him-/herself, and to emphasize the agentivity of the subject. I think and I don’t know belong to the high-frequency I + verb collocations in spoken American and British English. I think is the single most frequent I + verb combination in the spoken components of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)2 and the British National Corpus (BNC). I don’t know is the single most frequent negative collocation in both corpora. In other words, I think and I don’t know are almost ubiquitous as stance-markers in spoken L1 English. Both collocations occur in different grammatical forms, which carry distinct, interactionally salient, meanings. The formal and meaning variants will be described in detail below. At this stage, it is sufficient to point out that these variants are the result of grammaticalization processes, which affect only nativised varieties of a language. L2 varieties acquired through foreign language learning are not involved in these processes. Therefore, new linguistic items and new functions of established items in the L1 varieties will reach the L2 Englishes inevitably later or not at all— especially when the variants are restricted to spoken registers. Innovations affect L2 speakers through formal instruction whenever the innovation reaches the standard variety in the L1 and is included in EFL textbooks. Whenever this is not the case, the innovation can only be introduced by individual speakers who acquired the new form in other ways. This results in an uneven and domain-specific distribution of the innovation. In other words, an innovation may not progress very far or very easily through L2 Englishes or discourse communities which operate on an ELF basis. As in the COCA and the BNC, in both the L1 and the ELF data used in the present context, I think and I don’t know are the two most frequent collocations. But because the L1 and the L2 Englishes are not involved in the same processes of linguistic evolution, the use of the collocations in the ELF data may differ from the L1 English data and result in different patterns of stance-taking by means of I think and I don’t know. 3. Database The data consists of three audio-taped elicited conversations in English—one with a group of English L1 speakers and two with L2 English speakers.3 The participants in each conversation talk about a specific topic of general interest provided by the researchers, for example, ‘the role of English in the world’ or ‘men and women in the contemporary arts scene’. The topics were chosen in order to elicit the linguistic expression of opinions, beliefs, feelings and personal experiences as well as an overall argumentative discourse. The participants were not informed of the research design. They were led to believe that they were taped because of a general, unspecified interest in their views on the topic under discussion. The researchers were not present during the conversation. Even though the discussions were in principle open-ended, each came to a close after about 30 min. The conversations were recorded in university settings in Germany. The language of the environment is German and all speakers (including the L1 speakers of English) are proficient in German. In theory, therefore, the speakers were able to switch to another shared language at any time. All participants are university students in their twenties, and apart from potentially hierarchical gender relationships, the 2 3
www.americancorpus.org. The conversations were transcribed according to the HIAT transcription conventions (Rehbein et al., 2004).
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Table 1 Contextual data of the speakers. Speaker
Sex
L1
L2
L3
L1 C M W F
Male Male Female Female
English English English English
German German German German
Hebrew
EFL1 H B L J
Male Female Male Female
Indonesian German Chinese Korean
English English English English
German, Japanese
EFL2 A M D P
Female Female Female Male
German French Nepali Gujrati
English English English English
(US) (US) (US) (US)
German German
German German German
Table 2 Utterances with ‘I’.
L1 ELF1 ELF2
Incomplete
Complete
Total
5 1 8
120 80 188
125 81 195
interactions are characterized by symmetrical role relationships. Table 1 shows the relevant contextual data for the 3 groups of participants. 4. I think and I don’t know in L1 and ELF discourses 4.1. Global frequencies Table 2 presents the overall frequency of utterances4 with ‘I’ in subject position. Table 3 shows the distribution of verbs co-occurring with ‘I’ across the data sets. Know and think are the two most frequent verbs in the L1 discourse.5 Each constitutes about one sixth of the total I + verb co-occurrences. In comparison, think is considerably more frequent in the two ELF discourses, while know is comparatively rare. In all discourses, I think and I don’t know are the most frequent collocations for think and know.6 Table 4 displays the frequency of I think and I don’t know in relation to the total of utterances with ‘I’. I think and I don’t know occur in three formal structures: Simple clause construction (5) (6)
I don’t know. (L1) I think about the Chinese people. . . (ELF1)
Main clause in complement clause construction (7) (8) 4
I don’t know how that works. (L1) I think it’s just gonna happen. (L1)
Complete utterances minimally consist of a finite clause with ‘I’ in subject position and a main verb. Cf. Baumgarten and House (2007) for quantification of co-occurrence patterns. 6 ‘‘Overuse’’ (Ringbom, 1998:194) of think and the collocation I think in L2 English student writing has been reported on by Altenberg (1997), Ringbom (1998), and Aijmer (2001). 5
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Table 3 Distribution of verbs co-occurring with ‘I’. Verb
L1
agree ask be in/at/on/. . . x be like be x (identity/attribute) believe do feel figure find fit forget go go grow up guess have a look have x (possession) hear know learn like live look love make make out (perception) mean mean to say move back need paint read realize remember say see sit back start study take talk think want/wanna
ELF1
ELF2 1 4
3 3 8
1 2 1
5
1 3 1
1
1 1 2 1
3 1
2
4 3 29
1 1 2 10 27
7 2 2 1
6 1 1
3
4
1 1 48 1
8
1
1
1 1 5
2 3
2 1 6
1 2 11 1
1 1
Total
3 3 22 3
46 1
1 54 4
120
80
188
Table 4 I think and I don’t know in relation to the total of I-utterances. I think L1 ELF1 ELF2
17.5% 53.7% 25.5%
I don’t know (21) (43) (48)
20.0% 5.0% 7.4%
(24) (4) (14)
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Verbal routine (Coulmas, 1981; Edmondson, 1989, 1999; Edmondson and House, 1981; House, 1996a,b) (9) (10)
Because you have to take 2 years in high school and I don’t know that’s just a thought cause they’re like: Oh, I wanna be like Tom Cruise or like all these movie-stars and so then they I don’t know. (L1) And so especially the younger people, I think, go for that, the new stuff. (L1)
In the following, we will discuss the occurrences of I think and I don’t know in our data separately and in greater detail. In each case, we will first briefly summarize the functional profile of the collocation, bearing in mind, however, that the descriptions that are available have evolved from the analysis of American and British English L1 speakers. 4.2. I think 4.2.1. Functional profile I think in British and American English has been studied from the perspectives of its polysemous semantic meaning and its functional diversification in discourse. Aijmer (1997, 1998) distinguishes between ‘cogitation’ (‘thinking’) as the prototypical meaning of I think and three other epistemic meanings, namely ‘belief’, ‘opinion’ and ‘subjective evaluation’, which derive from the linguistic and situational context of occurrence and the hearer’s inferencing. The epistemic meanings of I think are the result of a process of grammaticalization in English during which the selection of first person subjects for think outnumbered all other combinations, and the referential meaning of the collocation I think was bleached and gradually replaced with subjective meanings (Traugott, 1995; Thompson and Mulac, 1991; Hopper and Traugott, 1993). Because speakers talk less often about events and actions than about themselves in a conversation, their feelings, attitudes and views of the world, I think occurs most often as a so-called epistemic clause (Scheibman, 2001) in spoken discourse, where it expresses the speaker’s degree of belief in, opinion, or subjective evaluation of the proposition. These meanings, however, are only fuzzily delineated from each other and, at the same time, highly context-dependent. Several researchers have pointed out that the precise meaning of instances of I think in spoken discourse can only be established when the analysis combines the semantic criteria, the syntactic structure of the occurrence, the linguistic and situational context of occurrence and its prosodic features (Aijmer, 1997; Simon-Vandenbergen, 2000; Ka¨rkka¨inen, 2003; Kaltenbo¨ck, 2009). Cutting across the distinction between belief, opinion and subjective evaluation is the distinction between ‘tentative’ and ‘deliberative’ uses of I think (Aijmer, 1997). In the tentative use I think functions as a hedge; it expresses the speaker’s uncertainty about the presentation of the proposition. In the deliberative use, which is signalled by the complementizer that and prosodic prominence, I think functions as a boosting device which expresses the speaker’s reassurance (Aijmer, 1997; Simon-Vandenbergen, 1998). Because of the overall difficulty of establishing the precise semantic meaning of an individual occurrence of I think in discourse, and because only fragmentary prosodic information is available for the present data, no attempt will be made at establishing the precise meaning variant of the single occurrences of I think (and I don’t know).7 At the risk of slightly oversimplifying the matter, we will work with the notion of a core meaning of opinion, belief and evaluation. In her functional analysis of I think in spoken discourse Ka¨rkka¨inen (2003) finds that, in most cases, the differentiation of the semantic meanings of I think – as given above – cannot be systematically aligned with the pragmatic and interactional functions of I think in discourse. On the basis of an analysis of L1 conversation data, she describes three main interactive functions for I think, which cut across the semantic meanings of the expression: First, I think has a ‘starting point function’, i.e. the collocation serves as a point of departure for the verbalization of the speaker’s personal perspective which may co-occur with topic shifts and topic changes, the introduction of a new perspective on the same topic, and the display of the speaker’s heightened involvement and commitment in the subject matter. Secondly, I think serves as a marker of on-line planning, and thirdly, I think is a device for focussing the completion of a sequence of utterances or a turn and pursuing recipient uptake. Finally, some researchers suggest that I think is not so much a full finite clause but a discourse marker (Holmes, 1990; Ka¨rkka¨inen, 2003). Aijmer (1997, 1998), however, argues that I think is only an incomplete discourse marker because it still shows structural and formal flexibility, e.g. with respect to the optionality of the omission of the 7
Even if prosodic information were available, one would first have to address the problem of establishing criteria for assessing the non-native prosody in terms of meaning differentiation.
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Table 5 I think: distribution over formal structures. L1
ELF1
ELF2
Simple clause construction Complement clause construction Verbal routine Unclear
0 10 6 0
0.0% 62.5% 37.5% 0.0%
6 26 11 0
13.9% 60.5% 25.6% 0.0%
2 30 12 4
4.2% 62.5% 25.0% 8.3%
Total
16
100.0%
43
100.0%
48
100.0%
complementizer that, which reflects interaction with the grammar of the utterance. For this reason and because of distributional differences in the L1 and the ELF discourses, which may be related to the grammatical status of the expression, we decided to differentiate between uses of I think as main clause in complement clause constructions with or without complementizer, on the one hand, and verbal routine-like uses of I think in utterance-medial, clausemedial, utterance-final, and clause-final position, which are more detached from the grammatical structure of the utterance, on the other hand. Both structural forms, however, express the same meaning of belief, opinion and subjective evaluation. 4.2.2. I think: formal structures, meaning variants and discourse contexts Table 5 displays the distribution of I think over the structural forms in the L1 and ELF discourses. In the L1 and the ELF discourses I think is predominantly used as main clause in complement clause constructions where it serves to express the speaker’s belief, opinion and subjective evaluation for hedging or boosting the speaker’s stance towards the upcoming proposition in the complement clause. In the majority of cases the complementizer that is omitted. The L2 speakers show a much higher ratio of that-omission (7.6% of full structures) than the L1 speakers (25% full structures), which suggests that the L2 speakers are less aware of the structural variability of the collocation, and possibly also of the associated meaning differences with respect to the ‘tentativeness’ and ‘deliberativeness’ of the speaker’s stance. Single clause constructions of the type I think about, which expresses the prototypical meaning ‘cogitation’ and the formulaic I think so, which overtly signal the speakers’ agreement or their belief, opinion and subjective evaluation in the context of corroborating a preceding proposition, occur only in the ELF discourses. Conversely, I think in the ‘pragmaticalized’ (Hopper and Traugott, 1993) verbal routine form is more frequent in the L1 data than in the ELF data. As mentioned above, Traugott (1995) and others have shown that in the process of the evolution of a language, a progression from propositional to subjective-expressive meanings can be witnessed. A linguistic form which starts out as a lexical item progressively loses in referential meaning, while at the same time acquiring first textual (i.e. discourse organizational) and then pragmatic, subjective meanings. In the case of I think (and as we will see below, in the case of I don’t know as well), this process of subjectification entails the loss of much of the form’s grammatical dependency on the utterance syntax such that it becomes more versatile as to the syntactic positions in which it can be used, while its meaning becomes vague and context-dependent. As a consequence, I think can be used in different formal structures, each fulfilling different functions in the discourse. This functional split of I think into main process, epistemic clause in complement clause constructions and verbal routine is reflected in our data. All three variants of I think are present in the L1 and the L2 Englishes, albeit to different degrees. In contrast to the L2 speakers, the L1 speakers do not use I think as main process, i.e. as the basic, fully lexical form, to express their cognitive processes, and they also do not use the formulaic expression I think so to convey their agreement to previous talk. The frequencies for the more pragmaticalized form of I think as epistemic main clause in complement clause constructions are comparable in the L1 and the ELF data. But the frequencies for the yet more pragmaticalized subjective verbal routine use of I think, which stands outside the grammatical structure of the utterance, again, clearly separate L1 use from the ELF data. In our data, we can distinguish between instances in which I think is used to express only an opinion, belief or subjective evaluation, and instances in which this function of expressing a belief, an opinion, or a subjective evaluation is embedded in the realization of other discourse functions. Consider, for example, (11), where the participants discuss art photography, in particular one portrait of John Lennon. The speaker A expresses her opinion that she does not consider John Lennon good-looking.
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Occurrences of I think such as in (11) are, as it were, voluntary contributions of the speaker’s subjective perspective on the subject matter. They are not overtly motivated by the ideational progression of the discourse, by the structure of the speaker’s utterance/turn, or the interactional structure of the discourse. It is relatively rare, however, that speakers’ only state their opinion, belief, or subjective evaluation, and that their utterance does not relate in a more specific way to the ideational or interactional structure of the discourse. In our data, I think – and its function of expressing a belief, opinion, belief, or subjective evaluation – is usually embedded in an utterance or sequence of utterances which fulfil other functions in the discourse. In (12), for example, I think accompanies a topic change; in (13), the speaker rejects another speaker’s preceding utterance. (12)
L1
C
And that’s what’s fun, I think, to learn the language here or English or French or whatever because it’s, it has nothing to do with your general area but you’re just talking a totally different language. I think, I’ll, I’ ll (??) that, ehm, that learning other languages didn’t start, ehm, for a very long time ago.
W
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These communicative tasks are apparently perceived as being more easily realized, or more acceptable to the other participants, when they occur in the guise of the speakers’ opinion, belief, or subjective evaluation. The discourse contexts in which I think occurs in the L1 and the ELF data overlap only partially. I think occurs in the following contexts in both the L1 and the ELF discourses: – – – –
Providing an answer to a question Corroborating other’s utterance Introducing new or related topic Repeating own or other’s contribution
I think is found exclusively in the ELF discourses in the context of – – – – – – – – – – –
Expressing agreement Drawing conclusions Contradicting Expressing contrasting views Displaying knowledge Elaborating previous (own) utterance Sharing personal experience Rejecting other’s contribution Reinforcing own preceding claim Giving explanations Conceding
In the ELF discourses, I think is apparently more versatile with respect to the discourse contexts in which it is employed than is the case in the L1 discourse. Unlike in the L1 data, I think in the ELF discourses is employed in contexts where the speaker’s subjective perspective on the ideational and interactional progression of the discourse is not only foregrounded through the use of the first person pronoun alone but where the discourse function of the speaker’s contribution on its own implicates a stance-taking by the speaker. For example, the expression of agreement, concluding or rejecting focuses the present speaker as the source of the agreement, conclusion and rejecting even if the speaker does not use I think (cf. 13 above). In these contexts, I think marks an additional, overt expression of the subjective perspective and explicates the speaker’s stance-taking. Further, it is only in the ELF data that we find what can be interpreted as indications of deliberate or conscious speaker choice for or against the overt expression of speaker stance through I think, because the expression occurs in the context of aborted utterances and repair. The break-offs after I think could be indicators of the speakers’ insecurity about the semantic–pragmatic status and meaning potential of I think and its appropriateness and communicative effectiveness in the discourse context. This explanation seems to be supported by the fact that the speakers resume their utterances after the break-offs with impersonal constructions such as questions (14), nominal constructions (15), or the disclosure of personal information (16), which do not overtly express the speaker’s stance in terms of a belief, an opinion, or an subjective evaluation but still convey the speakers’ subjective perspectives.
(15)
ELF2: Nominalization
P D
Ya. Women have to come themself up. Up, up. [How] it is. [Yes.] But, but . . . I think/ it’s, it’s my opinion. Ya, well, obviously.
P D
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(16)
ELF1: Disclosing personal information
L
Yeah, sometimes Eng/English is better for, for us to understand. When Chinese is, is di/di/dialect ((1s)) it’s also for me, it’s also a
foreign language. ((laughs)) Hm. Hm. ((5s)) [But] I think it’s. . . ((1s)) Eh, for me, eh, I’m [Yeah.] studying BWL, economics. I think for me it’s very important or, or it’s, it’s make sense. . .
H L B L H L
The utterances in (14)–(16) fulfil functions which are comparatively risky in their respective discourse contexts. (14), for example, functions as a display of knowledge in the context of a slightly heated discussion about the chronological order, styles and artists of different periods in art history. At this point in the discourse, the participant framework of the conversation is unsettled; the speakers can lose in standing by displaying too little or too much expertise and by expressing – their potentially faulty – knowledge in a manner which will be directly related to the speaker’s person. Similarly, in (15), P – the only male in the group – chooses not to use I think as an explicit marker of subjectivity for reinforcing his claim that women in the arts scene, and in all other fields, have to overcome discrimination by themselves. Finally, in (16), L resumes the conversation after an extended pause of 5 s during which none of the other participants offers a contribution or a comment on his preceding utterance. Any speaker who picks up the conversation after the long silence will inevitably be at the centre of attention and the utterance will be particularly exposed to the scrutiny of the other participants. But during this silence – even though the conversational floor is open – the previous speaker remains at the centre of attention as the one who or whose contribution triggered the interruption in the flow of the talk. Accordingly, the next move shows the speaker’s initial reticence to put additional focus on his already exposed position. Instead of directly continuing with the verbalization of an opinion, belief or subjective evaluation, the speaker breaks off and chooses an action verb to introduce personal background information which justifies his re-assuming the floor. The background information thus serves as a point of departure for the expression of a subjective evaluation. In all these contexts, the speakers do not employ I think as a direct, explicitly subjective and unequivocally stance-marking device. The idea that the L2 speakers consciously try to adjust their stance-marking to what they perceive as appropriate or communicatively effective in the discourse context is supported by the fact that we also find repair moves initiated with I think. In (17), the speaker begins the utterance as a direct assertion – a negative evaluation – and then breaks off to restart the utterance with the overt stance marker I think. Interestingly, in cases such as (17), the speakers can usually judge from the preceding contributions of the other participants that they will have the same opinion on the matter as the one the speaker is about to express.
We can hypothesize that the use of I think in our ELF data depends at least in some cases on whether or not the speakers can judge from the preceding discourse that their upcoming move is not too risky to include an explicit expression of speaker stance and that their opinion, belief or subjective evaluation will be shared or at least accepted by the other participants. Since we do not find aborted utterances and repair around I think in the L1 data, we might further
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Table 6 I don’t know: distribution over formal structures. L1 Simple clause construction Complement clause construction Verbal routine
9 5 10
Total
24
Percentage of I-utterances
ELF1
20.0%
37.5% 20.8% 41.7%
1 3 0
100.0%
4
ELF2
5.0%
25.0% 75.0% 0.0%
7 3 4
100.0%
14
50.0% 21.4% 28.6% 100.0% 7.48%
assume that the dysfluency phenomena in the context of I think could indicate that the interactional structure of ELF discourses is considered to be more in limbo and susceptible to the speaker’s stance-taking by the participants than the participant framework of L1 interaction. Thus, for speakers in ELF conversation, I think is the most common means of overtly encoding a subjective perspective in the discourse, but it is not possible to conclude that L2 speakers use the collocation indiscriminately as an all-purpose, anywhere element. There are indications that the L2 speakers seem to consider the interactional framework of the discourse when they choose to use I think. This suggests that the L2 speakers are aware of expressing subjective meanings and taking stances and also that the expression of subjectivity is seen as a potential trouble spot by the participants in the ELF conversations. 4.3. I don’t know 4.3.1. Functional profile In its prototypical meaning, I don’t know is a marker of the speaker’s insufficient knowledge about the topic of the discourse, i.e. the expression is a declaration of the inability to supply information. Tsui (1991) distinguishes six pragmatic functions of I don’t know which derive from this core meaning of insufficient knowledge. Depending on their sequential placement in discourse, the pragmatic use of I don’t know expresses the speaker’s avoiding assessment, prefacing disagreement, avoiding explicit disagreement and commitment, minimizing impolite beliefs, and indicating uncertainty. Beach and Metzger (1997) identify a threefold function behind ‘insufficient knowledge claims’ with I don’t know: Firstly, the expression marks the speaker’s uncertainty and concerns; secondly, it serves to withhold or postpone acceptance of others’ invited and requested actions and, thirdly, it serves to construct neutral, non-committed positions for the speaker by disattending or seeking closure on topics. Scheibman (2000) investigates functional differences between the full and reduced vowel variants of don’t in I don’t know in conversational data. She finds the same meaning variants as Tsui and Beach and Metzger, but she is also able to show a functional split between the full and reduced vowel forms in conversation. The reduced vowel form occurs more often in contexts in which the collocation expresses its pragmatic meanings while the full vowel form appears to be more firmly associated with the expression of the prototypical meaning of insufficient knowledge. Among the pragmatic meanings, it is in particular ¨ stman, 1981) – similar to Beach and the function of I don’t know in turn-final position as a floor yielding device (O Metzger’s function of seeking closure – which is associated with the reduced vowel form. Diani (2004), finally, suggests that the use of I don’t know in conversation is regulated by the speaker’s adhering to politeness principles.8 With regard to the expression of speaker stance, I don’t know in L1 British and American English thus signals the speaker’s insufficient knowledge, his/her avoidance of the expression of an overt, unequivocal stance towards the subject matter, and a hearer-oriented discourse organization in terms of an opening-up of the conversational floor to the other participants. 4.3.2. Formal structures and meaning variants Table 6 presents the distribution of I don’t know over structural forms in the L1 and the ELF discourses. The table also shows once more the frequency of the expression in relation to the total of utterances with ‘I’. The L1 and the ELF discourses show different distributions of the collocation over structural forms. The L1 speakers use I don’t know predominantly as a verbal routine (18), i.e., they use the expression to encode pragmatic meanings that do not denote a 8
Diani (2004) also shows that co-occurrence with the discourse markers well, oh, I mean, and you know can influence the realization of the pragmatic functions of I don’t know in discourse.
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Table 7 I don’t know: syntactic positions.
L1 ELF1 ELF2
Initial
Medial
Final
Total
7 (43.7%) 4 (100.0%) 5 (55.55%)
1 (7.1%) 0 (0.0%) 3 (33.3%)
8 (50.0%) 0 (0.0%) 1 (11.1%)
16 4 9
real deficit in knowledge. The L2 speakers prefer the simple clause constructions (19) and the use of I don’t know as main clause in complement clause constructions (20), which both encode the meaning ‘insufficient knowledge’.9 (18)
It’s like, I don’t know, if you look like and think of (this), it goes to what works best especially in business and things like that because I don’t know if that’s people get lazier but they wanna be more effective. (L1)
(19)
I don’t know so much about Japanese. (ELF1)
(20)
I don’t know why it’s not, not pre. . . I, I really ask myself why there is no LAW against such THINGS. (ELF2)
Among the nine instances of simple clause constructions in the L1 discourse, three can be characterized as utterance-like verbal routines (21, below). They are intonationally complete and separate units, but unlike utterances, they do not in themselves constitute a move in the interactional structure of the talk in the sense of forwarding the conversation towards a potential outcome (Edmondson and House, 1981). They do not denote insufficient knowledge on the part of the speaker. Rather, they express the pragmatic meanings of the speaker’s uncertainty and avoidance of full commitment to the upcoming or preceding proposition. (21)
L1
C
Of all the Asian friends I’ve had they wanna learn English or whatever. And so it’s like, it’s already spread so far, it’s like you’re g/like you’re trying to change it and make another world language. That’ll be really hard to do though just because nobody will wanna do it. Hm. And I don’t know. Like I look here and just like going on in (??) and stuff when I lived in Hannover Hm. it was like. . . And it’s funny because everything h/every third word was like an American word.
F C F C
Table 7 shows the distribution of I don’t know over syntactic positions for utterance-internal I don’t know. In both the L1 and the ELF discourses, I don’t know occurs frequently in utterance-initial position. Overall, however, there are marked differences in the preferred position of I don’t know and the positional variability of the expression in the L1 and the ELF discourses. In both ELF discourses, the speakers prefer to use I don’t know in utterance-initial position. In ELF2, we find some instances of I don’t know as a verbal routine in medial and final position. In contrast to the L1 data, however, medial I don’t know in ELF2 signals and verbalizes on-line planning processes and appears not to be used to express the conventionalized pragmatic meanings. See, for example, (22), below. (22) A Think of ahm the criminals. Eh if, if people say you’re free to choose to do this or that yeah? But you are not free to kill anybody or I don’t know, harm anybody. Or so. So freedom is limited. (ELF2) This pattern of use contrasts with the distribution of I don’t know in the L1 data, in which the verbal routine uses of I don’t know occur – with one exception – exclusively in final position and never signal on-line planning.
9
The speakers in ELF1 use I don’t know exclusively with the meaning of ‘insufficient knowledge’.
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Only in the L1 data I don’t know is used for discourse organizational purposes. In turn-medial position it serves as a bridge between two related contributions by the same speaker (e.g. an elaboration of the previous contribution in 21 above); in utterance- and turn-final position I don’t know serves to emphasize the completion of the utterance or turn (23 below). In both these functions, I don’t know is hearer-oriented. Speakers pursue hearer uptake by minimizing their claim.
The use of I don’t know as a means of pursuing hearer uptake also illustrates the general property of the collocation in its verbal routine form of opening-up the discourse and the conversational floor to the contributions by other participants, even if the speakers continue with their contribution after I don’t know. This discourse organizational function of I don’t know is not found in the ELF discourses. The functional diversification of I don’t know in the L1 and the ELF discourses suggests that the collocation is oriented towards both the speaker and the hearer(s) in the L1 discourse, whereas it is solely oriented towards the speaker in the ELF discourses. In the L1 discourse, the pragmatic uses of I don’t know can be seen as hearer-oriented in that they implicate potential disagreement and potentially different opinions on the subject matter, inviting divergent contributions from the other participants. This is especially evident in the utterance-/turn-final uses of I don’t know, which clearly serve to signal that hearer uptake is possible. But also in utterance-initial and utteranceand turn-medial positions I don’t know has a hearer-oriented quality in that it serves to convey to the hearer(s) that the speaker is avoiding an unequivocal stance and a fully committed statement, ostensibly in order not to monopolize the talk and to force the speaker’s opinion upon the discourse and the other participants. This use of I don’t know invites the hearer’s evaluation of the speaker’s contribution and evokes the impression that the conversational floor is, in principle, open. In (24) below, for example, the participants discuss the influence of US-American culture on immigrant cultures. They agree that immigrants to the US are likely to lose their cultural heritage because the American culture ‘‘teaches us to lose our tradition’’. Speaker C then compares this effect of the influence of US-American culture on immigrant cultures to the economic practices of the US-supermarket chain Walmart on foreign markets. (24) L1 W F M F C W
C W C W C
You can just keep your culture and then do English but I’m thinking no. [It’s ruining]. . . [It’s like war.] Like if you’re Mandarine you have to learn English, you have to write it. It’s taking over. It’s a play. (??) There’s such a lack of rules that ehm it just, it teaches us to lose our tradition. And sometimes that’s good and s/sometimes that/that’s bad. But if you look at the people, at the kids, and, and how, like with music and with movies Hm. you know, it’s fans. [It’s like if it’s].. [And they come] and they go and it’s not tradition.[It’s a coming and going.] [It’s like if it’s done right] it could
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W F C
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work well. Kind of thing. [Hm.] [Hm.] I don’t know. It’s like, cause it’s a damn example, but with Walmart. . . We were talking about this the other day. Walmart used to go into places in the South.
In the L1 discourse, this hearer-oriented meaning of I don’t know is on the whole more frequently expressed than the speaker-oriented meaning of ‘insufficient knowledge’, which does not have comparable effects on the interactional structure of the discourse. By contrast, in the ELF discourses, I don’t know seems to be solely oriented towards the speakers, because it focuses either their insufficient knowledge about the subject matter or their on-line planning processes. In neither case are the hearer(s) challenged to provide their own contributions or to evaluate the speaker’s contribution. Hence, while the L1 speakers use I don’t know to express their subjective perspective on the proposition or sequence of propositions in terms of the avoidance of the overt expression of an unequivocal stance, the L2 speakers use I don’t know to overtly state their insufficient knowledge and to signal their being momentarily at a loss for words. The idea that I don’t know in L1 discourse is sensitive to the interactional framework of the discourse is supported by the fact that it occurs as a reaction to hearer-signals, such as hm in (24) above, which serve either as a ‘go-on’ signal or as an expression of the hearer’s questioning attitude. The speaker continues his turn with I don’t know as a marker of non-commitment and avoiding an unequivocal stance, thereby explicitly leaving the discourse open to diverging views of the subject matter by the other participants. It may be possible that the distribution of I don’t know across the L1 and the ELF data is a reflection of the different stages of the grammaticalization of the expression in the L1 and the L2 English varieties. That means, we find in the L1 English discourse both the prototypical single clause constructions and main clause in complement clause constructions expressing the meaning ‘insufficient knowledge’ and the verbal routine variants, each fulfilling different functions in the discourse. In the L2 Englishes spoken in the ELF discourses, we find a distribution over formal structures which suggests that I don’t know is not as functionally diversified in all the L2 varieties as in the L1 variety. The L2 speakers clearly prefer to use I don’t know prototypically, as an expression of insufficient knowledge in the form of single clause constructions and main clauses in complement clause constructions. The verbal routine form appears to be exclusively available for expressing on-line planning difficulties, which also expresses the prototypical meaning of ‘insufficient knowledge’ rather pragmatic meanings. 5. Conclusion I think and I don’t know show only partially overlapping patterns of use in the L1 and the ELF interactions. The L1 and the L2 speakers differ in the frequency of use of the two expressions, in their preferences for particular structural forms, meaning variants and contexts of use. Complement clause constructions with I think in the main clause as a marker of the speaker’s degree of belief, opinion or subjective evaluation of the proposition are the most frequent formal structure in both the L1 and the ELF discourses. In contrast to the L1 speakers, the L2 speakers use the single clause construction of I think more often and the pragmaticalized verbal routine form of I think less often. The L1 and the ELF data also show only a partially overlapping diversification of discourse contexts in which I think is embedded as a marker of the speaker’s opinion, belief, or subjective evaluation. Unlike the L1 speakers, L2 speakers use I think in contexts in which the speaker’s stance towards the proposition is already implicated in the sequencing of the utterances so that the collocation presents an additional, overt marker of the speaker’s subjective perspective. The higher frequency of I think in the ELF discourses and its distribution over a comparatively large variety of discourse contexts cannot be interpreted straightforwardly as a case of overgeneralization on the part of the L2 speakers. At least in some cases, the use of I think seems rather to be the result of the speakers’ choice on the basis of an evaluation of the meaning potential and the potential communicative effects of I think in relation to the participant framework of the discourse. This suggests, first, that the L2 speakers are aware of expressing subjective meanings and taking stances and, secondly, that the expression of subjectivity is seen as a potential trouble spot by the participants in the ELF conversations. In other words, the interactional structure of ELF discourses might be comparatively fragile and susceptible to expressions of subjectivity and stance-taking, or at least speakers assume that this is the case—possibly on the basis of their L1 communicative norms.
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The situation is somewhat different for I don’t know. Even more poignant than in the case of the distribution of I think over structural forms, the L1 speakers show a more frequent use of the more grammaticalized and pragmaticalized verbal routine form of the expression, whereas the L2 speakers more frequently use the less grammaticalized–pragmaticalized forms. That is, the L1 speakers use I don’t know predominantly to construct a stance out of its pragmatic meanings of uncertainty, avoidance, neutrality and non-commitment. The L2 speakers, on the other hand, construct a stance out of the prototypical meaning of I don’t know as a marker of insufficient knowledge, and they use the expression to verbalize and to overcome on-line planning difficulties. While the L1 speakers use the expression almost predominantly in a hearer-oriented way, with a view to the local interactional framework, there are no indications that the participant framework of the interaction is involved in the use of the expression in the ELF discourses. It is interesting to compare this preferred speaker-oriented use by the L2 speakers to a similar non-alteroriented preference of the use of the expression you know by L2 speakers in ELF interaction, which has recently been shown by the second author (House, 2009). To conclude, I think and I don’t know seem not to be endowed with the same range of functions in the L1 and L2 English discourses. L1 speakers in all-L1 interaction and L2 speakers in ELF interaction express different types of speaker stances with the two expressions. While the two ELF data sets show some similarities in the use of the two collocations in our data, it is not possible to decide whether our results are characteristic of ELF communication or characteristic of the individual L2 speakers in interaction. The L2 speakers’ general preference for the less grammaticalized forms might be taken to indicate that the function and frequency of the use of the verbal routine forms of I think and, in particular, I don’t know are not as immediately present for the L2 speakers as they are for the L1 speakers. On the other hand, it is also possible that the L2 speakers selected the more prototypical functions for the expressions with a view to the ELF setting, where they have to operate on the basis of a much reduced shared knowledge of mutually expectable communicative behaviour and linguistic knowledge. Transcription symbols () (??) (( )) <> / ... CAPS [] ‘ ‘’
unclear incomprehensible non-verbal manner repair aborted utterance pause of 0.25 s prosodic prominence overlap falling intonation fall-rise intonation
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Traugott, Elizabeth C., 1995. Subjectification in grammaticalisation. In: Stein, D., Wright, S. (Eds.), Subjectivity and Subjectivisation: Linguistic Perspectives. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 31–54. Tsui, Amy B., 1991. The pragmatic functions of I don’t know. Text 11, 607–622. Nicole Baumgarten received her Dr. phil. in applied linguistics from the University of Hamburg. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern Denmark in Sønderborg. Her main research interests lie in the areas of non-native English and English as lingua franca interaction, identity construction in L2 discourse, spoken academic discourse, and diachronic and contrastive genre and register analysis. Juliane House received her PhD in linguistics and applied linguistics from the University of Toronto. She is a professor emerita of applied linguistics at Hamburg University and a senior member of the German Science Foundation’s Research Centre on Multilingualism, where she directs several projects. Her research interests include contrastive discourse analysis, politeness theory, English as a lingua franca and intercultural communication.
