| Linguistic subjectivity is defined as the expression of self and the speaker's point of view in discourse (e.g. mental states, affect, preference, evaluation, generalization). This study explores the idea that in American English conversation participants primarily use language subjectively---to express attitudes and opinions---rather than propositionally, to present unmediated descriptions of the world. The theory informing this work is usage-based; it assumes that linguistic structure emerges from processes of conventionalization of form and function based on frequency of use. Following this theory, we would expect that if we are using language to express attitudes and opinions, then the most commonly occurring (sequences of) lexical and grammatical expressions in the corpus would be those that convey speaker stance.; The data for the study consist of portions of nine audiotaped informal conversations totaling 80 minutes and representing the language of 33 adult speakers of American English. Individual utterances were coded for a wide variety of structural and semantic/functional properties such as subject type, referentiality of subject, semantic verb type, and tense.; Examination of the local details of the most frequent subject-predicate combinations in English conversation shows that the majority of utterances are not used by speakers to convey unmediated information to one another. Rather, the expression of speaker stance is woven into the relating of descriptions of events and actors in a variety of ways. Moreover, this subjective expression shapes the structure of the interaction and the distribution of local grammatical and lexical patterns. In contrast, the structural sites of a more propositional mode of language use (i.e. relatively unpersonalized reporting on the part of speakers) are much more constrained in both frequency and form.; The use of conversational data in structural analyses raises several theoretical questions concerning the coherence of linguistic categories in individual language and typological studies, the viability of maintaining a distinction between semantic and pragmatic meaning in analytical practice, and the social and structural consequences of the relationships between speaker stance and participant interaction in discourse. |
