Journal of Sociolinguistics 10/5, 2006: 569595

Indexing stance: Reported speech as

an interactional evidential1

Rebecca Clift
University of Essex, United Kingdom

The notion of linguistic stance as a non-grammaticalized form of evidentiality

is here explored through an investigation of reported speech in English
interaction. Reported speech is found to be one of a variety of resources
with which speakers lay claim to epistemic priority vis-`a-vis recipients.
Such resources are not identifiable as stance markers independently of the
sequential contexts in which they appear; sequential position is shown to be
central in providing at once a constraint on what can be said and a resource
to exploit in saying it. Resources dependent on sequential position to index
stance are deemed to be interactional evidentials to distinguish them from
the well-documented stand-alone evidentials. Interactional and stand-alone
evidentials, as forms of deixis, are directed to the orientations of epistemic
authority and accountability respectively; their distinct means of marking
evidentiality are grounded in the motivation to be explicit with regard to
accountability and inexplicit with regard to authority.
KEYWORDS: Reported speech, evidentiality, stance, deixis, interaction

1. INTRODUCTION
This study is an investigation of the linguistic expression of stance in English.2 In
exploring how stance is achieved interactionally, it identifies the means by which
various linguistic features may act as stance markers in a particular context. In
specifying the nature of that context, it takes as its analytical focus a phenomenon
which is not ostensibly a stance marker at all: direct reported speech (henceforth
simply reported speech).
As we shall see, there has been considerable interest in the grammaticalization
of reported speech as a quotative marker. In its non-grammaticalized form,
however, reported speech hardly seems amenable to the methodical treatment
which grammaticalization makes possible. This paper explores the possibility
that it can indeed be used systematically and that, furthermore, its use in the
indexing of stance makes this particular usage a form of deixis. I shall give more
detailed consideration to past treatments of reported speech in due course; it is
necessary, in the first place, however, to sketch the origins of work on stance and
its status as a form of deixis.

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The notion of linguistic stance has developed out of a vigorous interest in the
phenomenon of evidentiality (see the foundational collection of papers in Chafe
and Nichols 1986 and collections in, for example, Guentcheva 1996, Johanson
and Utas 2000, Dendale and Tasmowski 2001 and Aikhenvald and Dixon 2003).
The study of evidentiality understood as indicating the source of information
on which a speaker bases an assertion, and, more broadly, the reliability of the
speakers knowledge (Willett 1988: 55)3 has, by common consent, come to
focus on the grammatical category of evidentials across languages. Thus, to cite
a well-known example, the independent verb in Tuyuca is minimally composed
of a verb root and an evidential (Barnes 1984: 256), the morpheme indicating
whether the speaker has personally seen the situation, has perceived it by hearing
or some other sense, infers it, has learnt it from others or deems it reasonable to
assume. Languages where marking for evidentiality is optional, such as English
and French, where it may be achieved lexically (e.g. apparently/ evidemment
[evidently]) or modally (e.g. thatll be the postman/ la Reine serait malade
[the Queen is understood to be ill]) have largely been left out of account4
in order to preserve the status of evidentiality as a grammatical category (see
Aikhenvald 2003: 19; Joseph 2003: 311). The notion of stance has thus emerged
from the observation that probably all languages have some means of taking a
covering stance towards statements and events that are not a matter of category
or grammar per se (Joseph 2003: 311). Such a covering stance, of course, is not
restricted to matters of epistemic source or reliability, but may cover a broad range
of phenomena. Biber et al. (1999) identify three categories of stance: epistemic
(concerned with certainty, doubt, actuality, source of knowledge, imprecision,
viewpoint and limitation), affect (concerned with states, evaluations, emotions
and attitudes), and manner (relating to style of speech). It is the first category
of epistemic stance which corresponds to the grammaticalized phenomenon
of evidentiality and it is this phenomenon with which the current article is
concerned.
Studies of epistemic stance (hereafter simply stance) have focused on the
lexical or modal means by which non-grammaticalized evidentiality is indexed.
In this regard, stance and evidentiality are clearly forms of deixis in their indexing
of information to some point of origin (for discussion, see Mushin 2001: 33
35). So just as deictic terms index aspects of the speakers position, whether
spatiotemporal or social, stance indexes aspects of the speakers position with
regard to what they are saying: their epistemological assessment (Mushin
2001: xi) of it. And just as deictic terms carry spatiotemporal or social
coordinates, stance is inherent in and clearly carried by certain forms (e.g.
presumably, or, in Japanese, sentence-final tte or rashi) or constructions
(e.g. said to be. . .) (see, e.g. Biber and Finegan 1988, 1989; Chafe 1986;
Ifantidou 2001 for English, and e.g. Iwasaki 1993; Kamio 1998; Mushin 2001 for
Japanese).
In recent years, a substantial amount of illuminating work in this area has
focused on stance markers in interaction, showing the sequential implications

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of such markers being mobilised in talk. Both Du Bois (2002) and Karkkainen
(2003a, forthcoming) examine stance and intersubjectivity in interaction;
Haddington (2004) focuses on stance-taking in news interviews. Studies of
particular markers include Foxs work (2001) on hear, seem, evidently and
according to . . ., amongst others; Karkkainens examination (2003b) of the
prosody of stance markers with particular reference to I think; and Du Bois
study (2004) of the alignment between a current stance and a prior by means of
the markers too and either. Such markers are explicit indices of stance in the
utterances in which they occur.5
What follows similarly examines interactional data; however, in contrast,
it investigates how speakers index stance vis-`a-vis recipients with resources
not explicitly marked for such purposes. Instrumental in the deployment of
such resources as stance markers is a feature of language use which emerges
from the inescapable temporality of interaction: sequential position. As a
consequence, this study crosses, and goes beyond, traditional category boundaries
by investigating how a range of such resources lexical, phrasal, syntactic,
and subsequently reported speech itself are implicated in the expression of
stance.
I start by registering the established place of reported speech within studies
of evidentiality and then examine a naturally-occurring example which does
not appear to conform to known characterizations of evidential markers. In
important respects it also differs from the instantiations of reported speech that
have been the subject of previous studies. A set of such cases is presented to
show that such usage is not idiosyncratic to particular episodes of interaction
but is a systematic practice its systematicity of occurrence derived from the
specific position it occupies in an interactional sequence. Extended analysis
of the contexts in which the reported speech occurs reveals the range of
linguistic resources that can be used as stance markers, and illuminates the
use of reported speech itself. Given that evidentiality and stance are forms of
deixis, consideration is subsequently given to what exactly is indexed by such
markers, and why there are distinct explicit and inexplicit means of doing
so. The theoretical and methodological implications of the analysis will then be
discussed.

2. REPORTED SPEECH AND EVIDENTIALITY

Of course, on one level, no case needs to be made for the status of reported speech
as a marker of evidentiality: it falls squarely within the definition by Willett,
cited earlier, and, as noted earlier, in its grammaticalized form as a quotative
marker has attracted considerable attention from Whorf (1938) and Jakobson
(1957) onwards (for crosslinguistic surveys, see Aikhenvald 2003: 46, 812;
Jacobsen 1986: 48; and Willett 1988: 9697). But in its non-grammaticalized,
interactional incarnation, the evidential status of reported speech (see arrowed
turn) might not be immediately apparent:
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Extract 1: (Rahman: B:2: JV(14):4) Jenny (J) and Vera (V) are talking about
Veras son Bill, his wife Jean, and their children:6

1 J: Theyre [a lovely family now arent [they.

2 V: [ Mm:. [They are: ye[s.
3 J: [eeYe[s::,
4 V: [Yes,
5 J: Mm: All they need now is a little girl tih complete i:t.
6 J: [h e h h e h]
7 V: [Well I said t]uh Jean how abou:t it so our Bill (0.2)
8 laughingly said ey shell havetuh ask me fir:st no:w.
9 J: h:ha[: ha:
10 V: [huh huh-u huh-u[uh uh
11 J: [Eez ad enough as ee=
12 J: =heh[heh eh ih huh huh
13 V: [Yea::h hih- Yea:h,

The turn7 in reported speech, at line 7 Well I said to Jean how about it . . . does
not, on the face of it, fit the usual characterization of an evidential marker: that is,
as reporting what someone else said, such that what is reported is in fact hearsay
evidence from the position of the speaker. Indeed this particular case shows just
the opposite: someone quoting what she herself has said. Of course, this itself is
a grammatical stance device, with the first person reporting the source of the
information overtly identified in the main clause, with the proposition what
is reported provided in the dependent clause. But Veras relationship to what
she says is epistemically robust; no markers of uncertainty or mitigation could
here undermine the authority of the reporting, and in this respect it lacks what is
commonly recognised as marking for stance. Yet, as we shall see, this first-person
reporting is so marked: but before pursuing how this could possibly be a stance
marker, it may be useful to consider how reported speech has been characterized
in the literature.
Perhaps the most influential proposals8 regarding reported speech have been
Clark and Gerrigs assertion that quotations are demonstrations (1990: 764) and
Holts claim (1996: 241) that reported speech provides evidence. In general terms,
both are appropriate to characterize the example above. The Clark and Gerrig
study, however based not on interaction but on the utterances of single speakers
does not illuminate why reported speech should be used as a demonstration.
Holts proposal, grounded in a study of reported speech in storytelling,9 that
reported speech lends an air of objectivity to (an) account (1996: 242) certainly
rings true. The above extract differs, however, from the context of Holts examples
in that the reported speech is not used in the service of a more extended story, but is
deployed fleetingly in the course of an exchange with another. Furthermore, in its
use of self -reported speech it differs from all previous subjects of work on reported
speech. The focus of work hitherto has been on third-person reported speech, and
thus on how such speech functions to defer responsibility to an outside authority,


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potentially effacing the speaker (see, for example, Bauman 1993). The question
of why this form of reported speech is used when it is remains to be answered.

3. A SYSTEMATIC PRACTICE
In the first instance, it is important to note that the above case is not unique; the
following extracts show, in a manner similar to Extract 1, reported speech being
used by a speaker as a response to anothers prior turn:

Extract 2: (from Schegloff 1997: 173; MDE:MTRAC:60-1:2:1-2) Marsha (M),

who lives in Southern California, is separated from Tony (T), who lives in Northern
California. They are discussing the travel arrangements of their son Joey, who is
travelling from mother to father. Joey has had the top of his car stolen, and so
instead of driving from Southern to Northern California is flying. Tony broaches
the issue of how Joey will retrieve his car:

35 T: Wts e gnna do go down en pick it up later? er

36 somethin like ( ) [well thats aw]:ful
37 M: [H i s friend ]
38 M: Yeh h[is friend Stee- ]
39 T: [That really makes] me ma:d,
40 (0.2)
41 M: hhh Oh its disgusti[ng ez a matter af]a:ct.
42 T: [ P o o r J o e y, ]
43 M: I- I, I told my ki:ds. who do this: down et the Drug
44 Coalition ah want thto:p back.h {hhhhhhhhh/(1.0)}
45 SEND OUT the WO:RD.hhh hnh
46 (0.2)
47 T: Yeah.
48 M: hhh Bu:t u-hu:ghh his friend Steve en Brian er driving
49 up. Right after:: (0.2) school is out.En then hill
50 drive do:wn here with the:m.

Extract 3: (Holt: X-1-1-6: 2) Lesley (L) has just announced to Mum (M) that her
phone had been cut off by the phone company, British Telecom, for non-payment
of a bill, and that this had happened to several people in the area in the last few
days:

53 M: Oh: lo:ve.
54 (0.4)
55 M: Thats a nuisance isnt it.
56 L: Ye[s.
57 M: [Theyre getting terrible.
58 (0.3)
59 L: We:l[l I- I s a i d ]
60 M: [I mean look what]

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61 (0.2)
62 L: I said to them. This is British Telecom for you.(h) =
63 M: =Yes. .h An look what they cha:rge. They charge you
64 h three pounds (just thave) this blessed old thing
65 in your hou:se.
66 (0.5)
67 L: Yes.

Together, these three extracts appear to show participants engaged in very

diverse business: discussing grandchildren, reflecting on a sons misfortune, and
complaining about the telephone company. Yet closer attention specifically to the
turns in reported speech, and to the actions that are being performed, reveals that
each of them occurs in a very specific position in the sequence of turns: following
assessments. The speaker who produces the reported speech is clearly using it to
be responsive to an assessment from the other. So in Extract 1, Veras report of
what she said to Jean at line 7, and its response from Bill, is offered as a response
to an assessment from Jenny, All they need now is a little girl to complete it.
Extracts 2 and 3 similarly show the reported speech as following assessments. In
Extract 2, Marshas I told my kids . . . follows assessments from both Marsha
herself, Oh its disgusting and, in overlap with the end of her assessment, Tony
with poor Joey. In Extract 3, Lesley launches her turn in reported speech at
line 59 following an assessment from Mum, Theyre getting terrible, and a
slight pause, only to relaunch it at line 62, having found herself in overlap with
Mum. So in all three cases, the reported speech turns are placed in a distinct
sequential position after a prior assessment. Furthermore, these assessments may
themselves be seen to follow prior assessments and agreements with them. These
cases of reported speech, then, all occur in what may be broadly characterized as
assessment environments. Such commonalities, of course, do not in themselves
make a case for significance.10 So before undertaking a closer examination of the
data, it is important in the first instance to establish the relevance of invoking
sequential position specifically, the position of one turn after another for the
analysis. And with respect to the examples of reported speech, it will then be
necessary to examine both the production of assessments and what is being done
by means of them. Only then will it be possible to identify the means by which
reported speech is used to index stance.

3.1 The centrality of sequential position

It is a truism that the production of a turn constrains what can possibly come next:
to take a simple example, there are constraints on the contexts in which a speaker
can repeat what another has just said. To respond to anothers observation Its a
nice day with Its a nice day with identical prosody may warrant assumptions
about ones attention, facetiousness, or sanity.11 A speaker in receipt of such an
observation, therefore, is bequeathed a set of options with which to construct a
response It is a nice day but even such a minimal adjustment in this case,


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prosodic is enough to identify the utterance as not an initial, but a subsequent

one.12 The bizarreness of responding to Its a nice day with an exact repetition is
thus largely due to the fact that the repetition is actually another initial utterance
in a position where it should be marked as a subsequent one. After all, one would,
in repeating, thereby be laying claim to what was properly the first speakers
observation and thereby claiming a form of epistemic priority. Sequential position,
then, can be seen to be a primary consideration in the construction of turns; as
such it is centrally implicated in such epistemic claims, and so in the indexing
of stance. It is work exploring this relationship which provides the analytic
traction for investigating assessments in the context of our examples of reported
speech.

4. EPISTEMIC AUTHORITY AND SUBORDINATION IN ASSESSING

The issue of who produces an assessment first, and who second and thus who is
agreeing with whom is at the basis of work by Heritage and Raymond (2005),
who argue that this ordering tacitly encodes speakers differential rights to assess
referents. Heritage and Raymond propose that offering a first assessment, as at
the turns arrowed below, makes a claim to primary rights to evaluate the matter
assessed:

Extract 4: (from Heritage and Raymond 2005: 19; SBL 2-2-3:5) Chloe (Ch) and
Claire (Cl):

1 Ch: We:ll it was [fu:n Clai[re, ((smile voice))

2 Cl: [hhh [Yea::[:h,]
3 Ch: [ M]m

Extract 5: (from Heritage and Raymond 2005: 23; SBL:2-1-8:5) Norma (N) and
Bea (B):
1 N: I think everyone enjoyed jus sitting aroun
2 ta::lk[ing.]
3 B: [h h ] I do too::,

In each case the first position assessments are produced as simple declarative
evaluations and receive agreements in second position. However, it does not
necessarily follow that a speaker proffering an assessment first (or second) will
thereby claim primary (or secondary) rights to assess: in some cases, speakers
offering first assessments may work to defeat an implication that they are claiming
primary rights to evaluate the matter at hand. So the first position assessment may
be modulated in specific ways in order to downgrade its claim to primary rights
of assessment. In the following, Norma evidentially downgrades her assessment
of a long-time acquaintance of Beas with seems, and she in turn receives a
declaratively asserted agreement from Bea, Awfully nice little person:
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Extract 6: (from Heritage and Raymond 2005: 18; SBL:2-1-8:5) Bea (B) and
Norma (N):

1 B: hh hhh We:ll,h I wz gla:d she cd come too lasni:ght=

2 N: =Sh[e seems such a n]ice little [l a dy ]
3 B: [(since you keh)] [dAwfl]ly nice l il
4 p ersn. t hhhh hhh We:ll, I[: js ]
5 N: [I thin]k evryone enjoyed jus. . .

By the same token, speakers in the position of responding to an assessment may

work to defeat the implication that their rights to assess are secondary to the
speaker who in fact provided an assessment first. So a response such as thats
right to an assessment in effect claims priority in rights to assess (Clift 2005:
1658; Heritage and Raymond 2005: 26). And a negative interrogative in a second
position assessment (as in the following extract, at line 8) can attenuate its second
position status by providing a putatively new question for the previous speaker
to respond to:

Extract 7: (from Heritage and Raymond 2005: 22; NB VII:1-2) Emma (E) and
Margy (M):

1 E: =Oh honey that was a lovely luncheon I shoulda ca:lled you

2 s:soo[:ner but I:]l:[lo:ved it.Ih wz just deli:ghtfu [:l. ]=
3 M: [((f)) Oh:::] [ ( ) [Well]=
4 M: =I wz gla[d y o u] (came).]
5 E: [nd yer f:] friends] r so da:rli:ng,=
6 M: =Oh:::[: it wz: ]
7 E: [e-that P]a:t isnshe a do:[:ll? ]
8 M: [iY e]h isnt she pretty,

Margys assessment of her friend is formatted as a negative interrogative which

asserts her primacy in the right to assess someone who is, after all, her friend.
Heritage and Raymond examine a range of such grammatical practices through
which the producers of first and second assessments can index the relative
primacy and subordination of their assessments relative to that of co-participants.
Some of these are summarized in Table 1, and, as we can see from the examples,
some are instantiated in the data extracts of reported speech cited earlier. With
the exception of the first practice cited above evidential weakening, which
may be indexed in the selection of the verb none of the practices identified
here are in and of themselves explicit markers of stance; as is evident, it is
only in particular sequential positions that they can be implemented as such.
Heritage and Raymonds work is thus illuminating for what it reveals of the
interdependence of grammatical resources and sequential position. In showing
how speakers may choose to subvert the epistemic rights proposed by sequential
ordering an ordering that is the inevitable outcome of the real-time exigencies
of interaction it is also highly pertinent to the investigation of stance. As such,

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Table 1: Some practices for indexing relative primacy and subordination of

assessments: A summary of Heritage and Raymond (2005)
First position epistemic downgrading can be indexed by:
evidential weakening (e.g. seems, sounds)
tag questions (e.g. arent they from Extract 1, line 1;
isnt it from Extract 3, line 55)
Second position epistemic upgrading can be indexed by:
confirmation + agreement (e.g. they are, yes from Extract 1, line 2)
oh-prefaced second assessments (e.g. oh its disgusting,
from Extract 2, line 41)
tag questions (e.g. it is, isnt it)
negative interrogatives (e.g. isnt it beautiful)

it provides analytic resources with which to consider the exemplars of reported

speech cited earlier.

4.1 Reported speech in the environment of assessment

Recall that in the three extracts discussed earlier the turns in reported speech
occurred in what were broadly characterized as assessment environments. We are
now in a position to examine more closely the construction of those assessments
for what it promises to reveal about the reported speech itself.13 Let us consider
Extract 1 again:

From Extract 1:
1 J: Theyre [a lovely family now arent [they.
2 V: [ Mm:. [They are: ye[s.
3 J: [eeYe[s::,
4 V: [Yes,
5 J: Mm: All they need now is a little girl tih complete i:t.
6 J: [h e h h e h ]
7 V: [Well I said t]uh Jean how abou:t it so our Bill (0.2)
8 laughingly said ey shell havetuh ask me fir:st no:w.
9 J: h:ha [:ha:
10 V: [huh huh-u huh-u[uh uh

We can see from Table 1 that a primary resource for indexing secondary access to
a referent relative to a co-participant is the use of tag questions. It is now evident
that Jenny modulates her first position assessment at line 1 by means of the tag
question, which converts an assertion to be agreed with into a question to be
answered: Theyre a lovely family now, arent they. She thereby, as Heritage and
Raymond put it, cedes epistemic authority in the matter to her co-participant
(2005: 20), who, after all, is the childrens grandmother. Vera pounces on this
assessment with a confirmation They are followed by an agreement yes. As
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such, the ordering of these elements, as Raymond (2000), in a study of responses

to yes/no interrogatives shows, is a marked action. In prioritizing confirmation
over agreement, rather than the other way round, a speaker can propose that she
held this position prior to and independently of her co-participant (Heritage and
Raymond 2005: 23), despite being in the position of having to respond to that
co-participants assessment. Jennys acknowledging yes and Veras responsive
yes (line 4) in turn provide for the sequence to be brought to a close. But
Jennys subsequent assessment, all they need now is a little girl to complete it,
continues it. The strength of this assessment, marked in part by what Pomerantz
(1986) identifies as an extreme case formulation, all, is in stark contrast to
the evidential weakening that characterized her prior assessment at line 1. It is
only in the laughter produced subsequently (line 6) in what Schegloff calls a
post-completion stance marker (1995) which proposes it as light-hearted that
any modulation of the assessment is hearable. But if the laughter constitutes an
invitation to join in, as a means of affiliating (Jefferson 1979), Vera distinctly
resists doing so. While her response starts in overlap with the laughter, it displays
no orientation to it. Instead, the launch of the turn is placed directly after Jennys
prior turn, the well at its beginning indexing what follows as both responsive
to its prior but also counterpositional to it (Pomerantz 1984: 72; Sacks 1992a:
76). It is in this context of Jennys strong assessment, and Veras resistance to
it that we have a means of establishing what the reported speech is designed to
do. In the face of an epistemically upgraded assessment from her co-participant,
it provides a powerful evidential display of having reached that assessment first. By
reporting a past event which displays her own prior engagement with what has
just been raised, the speaker indexes her stance by laying claim to primary rights
to do the assessing. She claims priority in a sense, pulling rank on the basis of
sheer chronology: she was there first.
While Clift (2006) provides an extended examination of the design of what is
reported, it will suffice for current purposes to note that the construction of the
reported speech is designed to counter the prior assessment with an embodiment
of it; How about it is a familiar colloquial format for making a suggestion or
proposal in this case, a proposal which displays her pursuit of the assessment
that Jenny has just made. It is also designed to follow Jennys turn in another
respect: the it of How about it, as a subsequent, rather than an initial form,
refers to a topic already established (see Schegloff 1996b for an account of initial
and subsequent reference forms with respect to persons) and so can only refer to
Jennys all they need now is a little girl . . .. So as a subsequent rather than an
initial utterance (which is surely how the broaching of a topic would be done),
How about it is thus built to follow Jennys turn and so to take up a position with
respect to it.
In this light we can see how in the two other extracts cited earlier, reported
speech is produced in similar environments of competitive assessment and to
similar evidential ends. Most of Extract 2 is reproduced below:


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From Extract 2:
35 T: Wts e gnna do go down en pick it up later? er
36 somethin like ( ) [well thats aw]:ful
37 M: [His friend ]
38 M: Yeh h[is friend Stee- ]
39 T: [That really makes] me ma:d,
40 (0.2)
41 M: hhh Oh its disgusti[ng ez a matter af]a:ct.
42 T: [P o o r J o e y, ]
43 M: I- I, I told my ki:ds. who do this: down et the Drug
44 Coalition ah want thto:p back.h {hhhhhhhhh/(1.0)}
45 SEND OUT the WO:RD.hhh hnh
46 (0.2)
47 T: Yeah.
48 M: hhh Bu:t u-hu:ghh his friend Steve en Brian er driving
49 up. . .

Tony initially provides a generalized assessment of the situation thats awful

only to upgrade it (possibly, as Schegloff 1997: 178 notes, in response to Marshas
tepid yeh (line 38)) to the more personal that really makes me mad (line 39).
After a pause which commonly follows emergence from overlapping talk a post-
overlap resolution hitch (Schegloff 2000: 34) at line 40, Marsha provides a
second assessment, Oh its disgusting. The oh-prefacing, as a marker of second-
position epistemic upgrading, in combination with the upgrade to disgusting,
works to index Marshas claim to primary rights to assess the situation. The
upgraded assessment oh its disgusting is subsequently itself epistemically
upgraded by means of the reported speech, with that upgrade introduced explicitly
by as a matter of fact.14 The capacity of as a matter of fact to index what
follows as an upgrade (Clift 2003) reinforces the deployment of reported speech
here as an epistemic upgrade in this case of Marshas own prior upgrade of
Tonys assessment. Schegloff has noted of this extract that Marshas disgusting
is vulnerable to the suspicion that it has been coerced by Tonys prior really makes
me mad, itself a response to what was perhaps, in her lukewarm yeh (line 38),
a somewhat detached response to Tonys assessment (1997: 178). It is evident,
then, that while the oh-prefacing and the upgrade to disgusting are resources for
claiming epistemic priority, reported speech is the means by which it is possible
to display such priority (see Drew 1992: 485, and Sacks 1992b: 113114 on the
distinction between claiming and displaying): an interactional trump card. As
in Extract 1, the form of the reported speech itself shows exquisite attention to
Tonys prior assessment, his . . . really makes me mad enacted in the untempered
bluntness of what she reports, the directive underscored by the raised volume and
the whole reporting consistent with her own prior assessment its disgusting.
We are now in a position to see vividly instantiated the claims, noted earlier,
of both Clark and Gerrig (1990) that quotations are demonstrations and Holt

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(1996) that reported speech provides evidence, and to provide those claims with
an interactional basis. For the reported speech here shows again its capacity to
provide evidence, as no mere paraphrase could, of an event which existed prior
to, and independently of, that which prompted its introduction in the current
talk. Tonys response here shows its effect, a pause the opposite of an embracing
receipt preceding a bland acknowledgement, yeah. The yeah in this position
might be contrasted with a receipt such as oh which foregrounds prior talk
from what surrounds it, treating it as significant (see Heritage 1984: 305 on oh
as opposed to yeah and mm as informing receipts). Having trumped Tonys
expressions of sympathy and indignation, Marsha once more is in a position to
address Tonys question that she has twice before tried to answer (at lines 37 and
38): Wts e gnna do (line 35).
The use of reported speech in a dispute over rights to assess is also evident in
Extract 3:

From Extract 3:
53 M: Oh: lo:ve.
54 (0.4)
55 M: Thats a nuisance isnt it.
56 L: Ye[s.
57 M: [Theyre getting terrible.
58 (0.3)
59 L: We:l[l I- I s a i d ]
60 M: [I mean look what]
61 (0.2)
62 L: I said to them. This is British Telecom for you.(h) =
63 M: =Yes. .h An look what they cha:rge. They charge you
64 .h three pounds (just thave) this blessed old thing
65 in your hou:se.
66 (0.5)
67 L: Yes.

Mums response to Lesleys announcement that five people had their phones cut
off by British Telecom is sympathetic (line 53); she follows this with an assessment
which by dint of the tag question is epistemically downgraded. Lesleys response
a neutral yes is a far from emphatic endorsement of Mums assessment.
Indeed, Pomerantz (1984) has shown that agreements with prior assessments
are routinely performed by upgrading the prior assessment; in contrast, yes is a
weak agreement and indeed hearable as an incipient disagreement. The response
this gets is a common one in the face of less than animated agreement: an upgrade
by the producer of the first assessment (as also produced by Tony in Extract 2,
line 39) in order, as Schegloff proposes, to draw the previously weak stance into
a more vigorous alignment with the initial assessment (1997: 177). Indeed,
Mums upgrade started at the point where it is prosodically evident that Yes
is all that Lesley has to offer is produced zealously enough to partially overlap

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Lesleys response. The upgrade itself consists of the generalization from what had
been the assessment of the specific case thats a nuisance (line 55) to the hearably
complaining and more sweeping theyre getting terrible (line 57). Recall that in
Extract 1, Jennys strong assessment all they need now is a little girl to complete it
had followed her downgraded assessment; Mums comment here similarly follows
a downgraded assessment with one considerably stronger. The response it gets
is similarly restrained: in this case, a pause of three-tenths of a second. Lesleys
subsequent response is the same as Veras in Extract 1: the launch of reported
speech with the counterpositional well. But at the same time Mum undertakes
to clarify, by dint of I mean, what she apparently takes to be trouble Lesley
has with some aspect of her prior assessment. While the overlap results in both
speakers dropping out before completing their turns, followed by the post-overlap
resolution hitch in line 61, it is Lesley, at line 62, who restarts her turn.15 To do
so, she uses recognizably the same words she had used before, only this time
given the new sequential position of her turn omitting the turn-initial well.16
Like the exemplars of reported speech discussed earlier, Lesleys reported speech
embodies her co-participants just-prior action: a complaint. And in reporting
her earlier, independent registering of this complaint she stakes a primary claim
to it.
The deployment of the reported speech in the earlier extracts serves clearly
to subdue the co-participants, who are discouraged from continuing with their
own assessments. In Extract 2, Tony, we recall, is beaten back by Marsha; and in
Extract 1, Jenny responds to the report of Veras proposal to Jean, and of Bills
jocular response to it, with laughter in a clear display of alignment the laughter
itself an embodiment of how Vera portrays Bills delivery (laughingly). In
contrast, Mums response to Lesley here shows that she is undaunted in resuming
what she had launched at line 60. While her acknowledgement yes comes
on the heels of Lesleys reporting, she subsequently recycles what she had started
before. In deference to the new sequential position, however, she substitutes
the clarification marker (I mean) with the conjunction (and), transforming
what follows into another item on the charge sheet in a now jointly-constructed
grievance against British Telecom.
Reported speech alone, then, is clearly not invincible in establishing epistemic
priority, with this case showing a co-participant uninhibited in her subsequent
pursuit of her own complaint. To uncover the source of that complaint and
thus shed some light on why the reported speech in this instance fails to deter
the co-participant it is necessary to return to the interactional origins of the
sequence as a whole. These are to be found at the very beginning of the call:

Extract 8: (the beginning of Holt: X-1-1-6)

1 L: ...o
2 (0.3)
3 M: Hllo::::[(its)

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4 L: [Oh hello [Mum

5 M: [(me.)
6 (0.2)
7 M: H[ello,
8 L: [Howre you:
9 (0.5)
10 M: Oh: thank goodnss the li:nes clear toni:ght,
11 (0.5)
12 L: Oh:. wasnt it [ clear
13 M: [Its been awful this wee:k
14 (0.4)
15 L: Oh uh has i:[t?
16 M: [It seemed like a lot of pebbles in the
17 wire all the time.
18 L: .hhh Oh: dea:r.
19 M: Mm:.
20 (0.3)
21 L: .hhh Uh:m (0.2) .k Well we got cut off on Thursda:y,
22 M: Oh: dea:r. Thursday.

((20 lines omitted, during which Lesley explains that

they forgot to open the final demand for the bill))

43 M: Oh: they make you pay fr putting it on again too:.

44 L: Yes well we sent the money straight awa:y
45 (0.4)
46 L: .p
47 (0.2)
48 L: And we had it uh:m: back on on Fridee afternoon
49 M: .hmhh:
50 L: But apparently they cut w- fi:ve people off in
51 Galhampto[n: on[: Thursday-
52 M: [( )! [( )
53 M: Oh:: lo:ve.
54 (0.4)
55 M: Thats a nuisance isnt it.
56 L: Ye[s.

Mums complaint, formulated at line 13, is so precipitate at the opening of the

call that she neglects Lesleys inquiry at line 8 in favour of displaying her relief (line
10) relief which adumbrates the grounds for the upcoming complaint. It is thus
Mum who is first to register dissatisfaction with the phone company, expanding
on the initial complaint at lines 1617 and prompting a show of sympathy from
Lesley at line 18. Lesley then proceeds to launch a my side telling (Pomerantz
1980) at line 21 which formulates her own grounds for complaint, and which,
as we see, provides the basis for the subsequent assessment sequence.

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It is thus apparent that Mum has her own independent reason for voicing
discontent with the phone company, and indeed had registered it first. Herein,
then, lie the origins of her persistence in following up her own complaint in the
face of Lesleys attempt to claim authority in rights to assess. On a more general
level, too, while Extracts 1 and 2 show that the epistemic authority that reported
speech delivers may have the consequence of discouraging co-participants from
pursuing their own lines of assessment, this exemplar shows that such an outcome
is by no means a certainty; a speaker may find her claims to epistemic authority
matched or even outweighed by a co-participant.17
In sum, then, our extended consideration of exemplars has taken a different
perspective from previous treatments of reported speech, by examining fleeting
uses of reported speech in interaction uses which are far from those considered
to be the standard evidential third-person quotatives. In contrast to previous
work it has examined contexts where reported speech does not intrinsically
defer to a third-party authority. It has taken first-person reportings and has
built on the initial observation that the turns in reported speech follow
assessments. It has established that reported speech is one of a variety of
resources used by participants to index epistemic stance with regard to co-
participants, providing a powerful but not invincible display of epistemic
authority.

5. INDEXING STANCE: EVIDENTIALITY AND DEIXIS

By examining interactional data we have thus been able to establish that stance
may be indexed not simply through particular lexical items or phrases but also by
a combination of certain linguistic resources (which may be lexical items, phrases,
particular syntactic constructions or specific devices, such as reported speech)
and the position of its turn within a larger interactional sequence. Given that
the evidential capacity of such resources is only mobilized interactionally across
turns, where, as Heritage and Raymond put it, the management of information
preserves is inexorably relevant (2005: 34), they may be deemed interactional
evidentials to distinguish them from those markers which index evidentiality or
stance within the turn what one might, for current purposes, call stand-alone
evidentials. The analysis of the interactional data has thus revealed evidentiality
to have more diverse manifestations than is apparent from the composition of
an utterance. It has also brought into focus the types of relationship indexed
by evidential markers. Stand-alone evidentials typically serve to calibrate the
speakers accountability with regard to the truth of what is said;18 interactional
evidentials work to index the relative authority (or indeed subordination) of the
speaker over a co-participant with respect to what is said. It is thus to the divergent
orientations of authority and accountability in interaction that evidentials as
a category are directed. The observation, reported earlier, that evidentials are
forms of deixis may now be grounded in the proposal that evidentials are co-
ordinates plotted along the dimensions of authority and accountability in the
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same way that prototypical deictic categories index the speaker in the dimensions
of time and space. There are obvious similarities between some forms of deixis and
forms of evidentiality: the fact that interactional evidentials index the relationship
between one speaker and another (albeit an epistemic relationship) suggests
commonalities with social deixis or honorifics; and the importance of prior turn
as a reference point for constructing a current turn suggests clear parallels
with discourse deixis. However, in other ways, of course, evidentials are far
from prototypical deictic categories: for one, their function is not exhausted by
indexicality; and for another, the operation of interactional evidentials, being
sequentially dependent, is manifestly different from that of prototypical deixis.
This, then, raises the question of why the operation of interactional evidentials,
which depend on sequential position for their effect, is so different from that
of stand-alone evidentials and those other deictic markers so far identified. The
reason appears to lie in the nature of the dimensions being oriented to.
Accountability to the truth, or to the reliability, of what one is asserting, is surely
something to be made explicit: as explicit, perhaps, as the locating of oneself in time
or space, or in ones social relationship with a co-participant. So the recipient of an
utterance which begins Presumably . . . knows exactly where the speaker stands,
epistemically. Ones own epistemic authority or subordination in contrast, is
something which is perhaps better served by being kept inexplicit. So while thats
right as a response to an assessment that is, in a particular sequential position
serves to claim epistemic authority over the producer of the assessment, the
recipient is hardly in a position to register consciously that this is being done. As
Heritage and Raymond point out:
. . . relative epistemic rights to describe and evaluate objects within different
knowledge domains are part of our basic human rights to experience and its
expression. And . . . the regulation and sanctioning of such rights is no trivial
matter but is rather a part of the interactional housekeeping that is a condition
of personhood and even sanity (Goffman 1983). That the means by which that
housekeeping is managed are lost in a kind of Leibnitzian surf is . . . all to the good.
(2005: 36)
So the dimensions indexed by evidentials accountability and authority would
appear to motivate the means by which such indexing is accomplished; put
another way, formal considerations are shaped by interactional exigencies.

6. CONCLUSION
This study has focused on the use of reported speech in interaction as a means
of investigating the indexing of epistemic stance the non-grammaticalized
form of evidentiality. It has examined a particular form of reported speech
fleeting uses of self-reported speech and revealed the systematic features of its
construction and placement. Such systematicities even with the small set of
exemplars presented here argue that reported speech is not randomly placed,


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Grammaticalized

Standalone orient to
evidentials ACCOUNTABILTY

EVIDENTIALITY

Interactional orient to
evidentials AUTHORITY
Non-
grammaticalized
epistemic stance

Figure 1: Forms of evidentiality

but in such a form constitutes one of a number of resources, first identified by

Heritage and Raymond (2005), for indexing epistemic authority in interaction
relative to a co-participant. In environments of competitive assessment, reported
speech is found to constitute such a compelling claim to epistemic authority
that it can deter co-participants from continuing with their own assessments.
However, when a co-participant can claim equal or greater priority in rights
to assess, reported speech proves only a temporary deterrent, thus revealing its
limits as a competitive resource. The fact that a speakers stance of authority
or subordination vis-`a-vis a recipient can only be indexed by specific linguistic
resources in particular sequential positions suggests that these resources be
termed interactional evidentials to distinguish them from what are here
called stand-alone evidentials which index epistemic position irrespective of
sequential context. Stand-alone and interactional evidentials are directed to the
divergent orientations of epistemic accountability and authority, respectively, and
as such are forms of deixis; indeed, interactional evidentials resemble aspects
of both discourse and social deixis. It is suggested here that the distinction
in the means by which stand-alone and interactional evidentials are indexed
are grounded in motivations to be explicit with regard to accountability and
inexplicit with regard to authority. Figure 1 is a schematic representation of these
relationships.
One upshot of this work is thus to show how formal considerations in
this case, the means by which indexicality is accomplished are constrained
by interactional demands. And those means comprise a range of linguistic
resources, from the grammatical marking of evidentiality to the entire turns
of reported speech.19 So the prosecution of a particular action the epistemic
upgrading of a second position assessment, say may be accomplished in a variety
of ways, those ways being by no means categorically restricted.
It is the focus on action which makes for this papers particular perspective on
evidentiality. The identification of interactional evidentials suggests that to talk
exclusively in terms of what an utterance means captures less than characterizing
what it does: assessments and agreements, for example, are actions that follow

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actions and themselves give rise to actions. As Goodwin notes, Agreement is

not something known in an individual brain but something done in collaboration
with others (1996: 399; emphasis in original). While stand-alone evidentials are
identifiable as such from their composition alone and in consequence have been
extensively documented interactional evidentials would simply not have been
identified without examining the sequential position of the turns which contain
them. Nor would we have discovered the distinctive use of reported speech as one
form of evidential. Sequential position provides a set of parameters within which
interactional resources can be used to implement particular activities. So while
it provides a constraint, participants can also, as we have seen, exploit it by using
linguistic resources to subvert the rights implied by it. As Schegloff has noted, . . .
both position and composition are ordinarily constitutive of the sense and import
of an element of conduct that embodies some phenomenon or practice (1993:
121; emphasis in original).
To bring a consideration of sequential position to the analysis is also to capture
what a sole focus on composition cannot: the central importance of context.
In the analysis here, an apprehension of both the local and wider sequential
contexts has been necessary. The first step in identifying reported speech as
an evidential was to establish its sequential location in the environment of
assessment, and specifically as following assessments. And subsequently our
understanding of the exceptional case Extract 3, where Mum is clearly
undaunted by Lesleys use of reported speech was only made possible by taking
in the wider context: in this case, the beginning of the call. Thus was it possible to
identify not only what reported speech is used to do, but also to establish the extent
of its capacity to do it. That extent, of course, is established by the co-participant;
for reported speech is ultimately only as powerful an evidential resource as ones
co-participant will allow it to be. It is here, then, in interactional data, that we see
the limits to individual intention:
. . . The very conception of action having its origins in the acting individuals
intention treats the single action as the unit to be analyzed, and the single individual
as the proper locus of analysis . . . here . . . the availability of tape-recorded, repeatably
inspectable material, is deeply consequential. If one is committed to understanding
actual actions (by which I mean ones which actually occurred in real time), it is
virtually impossible to detach them from their context for isolated analysis with a
straight face. And once called to attention, it is difficult to understand their source as
being in an intention rather than in the immediately preceding course of action to
which the act being examined is a response and to which it is built to address itself.
(Schegloff 2003: 39)
The identification of interactional evidentials has thus involved a shift of both
theoretical and methodological focus from the isolated, atomistic and atemporal
utterance to the temporal unfurling of a turn in a sequence of turns. In
showing how speakers use linguistic resources to accommodate the inescapable
temporality of interaction, it has brought a consideration of context to the study
of a domain which has hitherto largely excluded it. And in documenting speakers


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epistemic positioning with respect to each other, it has captured something of the
distinctly social implementation of language.

NOTES
1. An early version of this paper was presented at the Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, in April 2005. I am very grateful to Nick Enfield,
Tanya Stivers and Emanuel A. Schegloff, as well as the two anonymous reviewers
and Nikolas Coupland and Allan Bell at the Journal of Sociolinguistics, for detailed
comments and suggestions on the first draft.
2. The data for this study are taken from both British and U.S. English sources, and
were transcribed by Gail Jefferson. Extracts 1 and 3 are of British English and are
taken from two corpora,Rahman and Holt respectively. My thanks to Gail Jefferson,
Elizabeth Holt and Paul Drew for access to these. Extract 2 is of U.S. English and is
also cited in Schegloff (1997).
3. Some authors subsume treatments of evidentiality under epistemic modality (see,
e.g. Palmer 1986: 66, Willett 1988; Traugott 1989; Bybee, Perkins and Pagliuca
1994: 179-180).
4. For a prominent exception, see Chafe (1986) on English.
5. Indeed, Biber and Finegan (1988, 1989) provide practical evidence of this by showing
how the computational tools and methodologies of corpus linguistics are suited to
isolating forms which index stance, by using frequency measures and statistical
cluster analysis to categorize stance markers across 410 and 500 texts.
6. The transcripts are notated according to the system developed by Gail Jefferson; the
conventions are set out in the appendix.
7. The term turn here, as an abbreviation of the more precise term turn-at-talk, is
used in an effort to capture the temporal production of talk in its context; utterance
is used generically and pretheoretically to indicate the thing said.
8. Treatments of reported speech have ranged far beyond the domain of evidentiality,
from the syntax and semantics of reported speech (see, e.g. Banfield 1973; Comrie
2000; Davidson 1984; Partee 1973) to approaches which unite pragmatics, literary
theory and ethnography, as in the collections in Coulmas (1986) and Lucy (1993).
For a study which examines (amongst other things) reported speech as a means to
an end in this case, how it is used by children to make accusations against each
other see Marjorie Goodwins groundbreaking ethnographic work on talk among
black American children (1990). For an overview, see Clift and Holt (2006); for an

extensive bibliography, see Guldemann et al. (2002).
9. Research on reported speech in interaction has overwhelmingly focused on
storytelling as the most common context for its occurrence, whether in ordinary
conversation (see, inter alia, Holt (1996, 2000), and the collection in Lucy (1993) or
in various institutional contexts (e.g. Buttny 1998; Clayman 2006; Galatolo 2006;
Rae and Kerby 2006; and Wooffitt 2006). In contrast the fleeting uses discussed
here are relatively rare; indeed, they are the only such cases to be found in a
collection of over 300 instances of reported speech. The others were all produced
in either storytelling or institutional contexts (or both), a skewing reflected in the
preponderance of literature on such uses, and the dearth of research on fleeting uses;
to my knowledge, only Clift (2006) and Couper-Kuhlen (2006) examine the sort of
fleeting uses discussed here.

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10. Indeed, one referee makes the point that the co-occurrence of both assessments and
I said might well be common, simply by chance in discourse, given the frequency
of both (the referee notes that a quick search of I said in a well-known corpus
of English conversation yields on average one example every 1000 words). This is
indeed the case. However, it is not simply that these are the only three cases found
in my corpus of non-storytelling or non-institutional reported speech, as observed
in the previous note; what underlines the case for their significance is the additional
systematic presence of the other features of turn position and composition discussed
in detail in what follows.
11. On the other hand, Schegloff (1996a) provides a compelling account of contexts
where such repeats are indeed possible, and perform distinct actions. In addition
to familiar contexts such as ritual exchanges of greetings or farewells, Schegloff
identifies a hitherto undescribed action which is implemented by repetition. The
action of confirming an allusion is undertaken by agreeing with another by
means of repeating what they have just said: this both confirms the content
of what is said and its prior inexplicit conveyance; to give but one example:
(from Schegloff 1996a: 183) interview with Susan Shreve on U.S. National
Public Radio concerning her recent novel: Bob Edwards, interviewer (E) and
Susan Shreve (S):
1 E Why do you write juvenile books.
2 (0.5)
3 E [s that- b- (0.?) [hav]ing [children? ]
4 S [Because I love child[ren]. [I really do:]=
5 =.hh I enjoy children:, .hh I started writing: (.)
6 juvenile books fer entirely pra:ctical reasons, .hh
7 (.)
8 S [u- u-
9 E [Making money::.
10 S Making [money
11 E [yes ((+laughter))
12 S that- that practical reason hhh
13 (.)
14 S Ive been writing juvenile books for a lo:ng..
As Schegloff remarks of this excerpt:
The interviewer has understood entirely practical reasons as an allusion to
the need for making money, and he formulates that as his next turn. In repeating
his formulation to confirm it, Shreve confirms as well the status of practical
reasons as an allusion to making money (perhaps a more tasteful allusion to
it). Her follow-up remark that practical reason is addressed just to making
this tie back to practical reasons as the allusive reference-source quite clear,
and a bit of laughing together marks their co-implication in introducing the
grubby subject into a discussion of the arts (see Jefferson, Sacks and Schegloff
1987). (Schegloff 1996a: 183)
As the above example shows, the prosody of the repeat may even be (but is not always)
virtually identical to that of the original.
12. In similar vein, initial and responsive utterances of how are you may be
distinguishable by stress; how are you is marked for initial inquiry (and for long-

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time-no-see or not-since-some-big event) and how are you is used for both initial
and responsive. I am grateful to Emanuel A. Schegloff for clarification on this.
13. The concern here being stance rather than reported speech per se, it is not the
intention to provide a characterization of reported speech here beyond what is
necessary to the exploration of stance. Clift (2006) analyses the extracts cited here
at greater length alongside a contrast set of cases to examine both the construction
of what is reported in terms of both form and content, as well as interactional issues
concerning the placement of reported speech.
14. While the transcript shows what is hearable on the tape as final prosody after fact,
such that Marsha appears to be saying oh its disgusting as a matter of fact. I told
my kids. . ., there are grounds for taking Marsha to be saying oh its disgusting. As
a matter of fact I told my kids . . ., with, as is suggested above, as a matter of fact
introducing the reported speech rather than qualifying disgusting (see Clift 2006:
fn. 2).
15. See Clift (2006) for a discussion of the robustness of reported speech in the
environment of competitive overlap.
16. See Schegloff (1987) on how the use of recognizably the same words may be used
to convey that what one is saying now is what one was saying before; and Schegloff
(2004) on what gets omitted in resayings.
17. But while giving a basis for, and possibly motivating, epistemic claims, these
circumstances of course in no way determine them; the stance a speaker chooses
to take is independent of the grounds for taking it. There may be undeniable
circumstantial evidence to support a particular speakers claim to authority
certainly in Extract 1 and 2: Vera, in Extract 1, is, after all, the childrens grandmother,
and so arguably has greater rights to assess them than does Jenny; in Extract 2, the
incident occurred outside Marshas house and she related this to Tony. So while these
may be the indisputable facts of the matter, we should of course be wary of seeking any
causal link between a speakers actual authority and their interactional stance. While
the former undoubtedly supports the latter (chronology being a powerful weapon in
such cases), it does not inevitably prompt it.
18. In pragmatic terms, they facilitate observance of Grices second sub-maxim of
quality: do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence (1975: 41).
19. Clift (2006) provides evidence to suggest that the normative length of a turn in
reported speech is one turn-constructional unit (TCU). A TCU may comprise a
sentence, a clause or a single lexical item; these may constitute possibly complete
turns; on their possible completion, transition to a next speaker becomes relevant
(although not necessarily accomplished) (Schegloff 1996c: 55).

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APPENDIX
Transcription conventions
The transcripts adopt the following conventions (adapted from Ochs et al., 1996:
461465):

[ Separate left square brackets, one above the other on two

[ successive lines with utterances by different speakers, indicates a
point of overlap onset
] Separate right square brackets, one above the other on

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] two successive lines with utterances by different speakers indicates a

point at which two overlapping utterances both end, where one ends
while the other continues, or simultaneous moments in overlaps
which continue.
= Equal signs ordinarily come in pairs one at the end of a line by one
speaker and another at the start of the next line (or one shortly
thereafter) by another. This indicates that the second speaker
followed the first with no discernable silence between them, or was
latched to it.
(0.4) Numbers in parentheses indicate silence, represented in tenths of a
second. Silences may be marked either within turns or between them.
(.) A dot in parentheses indicates a micropause, ordinarily less than
2/10ths of a second.
.?, The punctuation marks indicate intonation.
The period indicates a falling, or final intonation contour, not
necessarily the end of a sentence.
A question mark indicates a rising intonation, not necessarily a
question.
A comma indicates continuing intonation, not necessarily a clause
boundary.
::: Colons are used to indicate prolongation or stretching of the sound
preceding them. The more colons, the longer the stretching. On the
other hand, graphically stretching a word on the page by inserting
blank spaces between the letters of the word does not indicate how it
was pronounced; it is used to allow alignment with overlapping talk.
- A hyphen after a word or part of a word indicates a cut-off or
self-interruption, often done with a glottal or dental stop.
word Underlining is used to indicate some form of stress or emphasis,
either by increased loudness or higher pitch.
WORD Especially loud talk relative to that which surrounds it may be
indicated by upper case.
The up or down arrows mark particularly emphatic rises or falls in
pitch.

word The degree signs indicate that the talk between them is markedly
softer than the talk around them.
>word< The combination of more than and less than symbols indicates
that the talk between them is compressed or rushed.
hh Hearable aspiration is shown where it occurs in the talk by the letter
h: the more hs, the more aspiration.
.hh If the aspiration is an inhalation it is preceded by a dot.
word Word or words enclosed by pound sterling signs indicate the word is
articulated through a hearably smiling voice.


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INDEXING STANCE 595

(- - -) Words unclear and so untranscribable.

(word) Best guess at unclear words.

word Creaky voice.
((word)) Additional stage directions.

Address correspondence to:

Rebecca Clift
Department of Language and Linguistics
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
Colchester
Essex CO4 3SQ
United Kingdom
rclift@essex.ac.uk

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