Uncertainty markers in spoken learner discourse
Vol.18,No.2(2025)
Discourse and Interaction
The paper discusses linguistic forms conveying epistemic stance in L2 spoken production, focusing on expressing uncertainty. The source of stance markers is a subset of the Corpus of Czech Students’ Spoken English, particularly informal student-student discussions on a given topic. The main aim of the corpus analysis is to identify a variety of grammatical devices indicating the speaker’s uncertainty about the truth-value of a proposition and to examine their distributional patterns and positional preferences. Additionally, the paper explores roles of the construction I think, the most frequent stance marker in the discussions analysed. The findings indicate that Czech learners of English tend to employ a restricted set of items recurrently and use I think not only to express uncertainty but also to mitigate potential disagreement and signal turn-taking.
epistemic stance markers; L2 spoken discourse; Czech learners of English; uncertainty markers
Petra Huschová
University of Pardubice
Petra Huschová is Assistant Professor of English Linguistics at the Department of English and American Studies, University of Pardubice, Czech Republic. She specializes in morpho-syntax, stylistics and pragmatics. Her main research fields of interest include modality, hedging devices and speech acts. She currently focuses on analysing spoken learner discourse.
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Sources<br/>
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Copyright © 2025 Petra Huschová