Elsevier

Journal of Pragmatics

Volume 140, January 2019, Pages 1-11
Journal of Pragmatics

Between acknowledgement and countering: Interpersonal functions of English reportative adverbs

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2018.11.011Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Reportedly functions as a marker of attribution, both neutral and distancing.

  • Allegedly is used to counter claims made by the interlocutor.

  • Allegedly is concerned with the right to claim knowledge.

Abstract

This study focuses on examining interpersonal functions of two English reportative adverbs: reportedly and allegedly. In Martin and White’s (2005) typology of “resources of intersubjective positioning,” which this work employs, reportative adverbs are associated with the function of attribution, as they are used to “attribute the proposition to some external source” (Martin and White, 2005: 111). The aim of this study is to establish the contexts in which they signal different types of attribution (acknowledgement and distancing), and to identify any additional functions they perform. Most of the illustrative examples come from the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English. The type of attribution is demonstrated to depend on such factors as the syntactic position of the adverb, the type of sentence it occurs in, the amount of information given in the context and its status. Allegedly is shown to additionally perform a countering function. It is used to challenge the interlocutor’s right to claim knowledge and to undermine the reliability of the interlocutor’s claims. Reportative adverbs are thus shown to indicate both the status of the information presented by the speaker and the speaker’s position towards the information presented by the interlocutor.

Introduction

This study focuses on interpersonal functions of two English adverbs, reportedly and allegedly. They are used to signal that a claim is based on reported information, which situates them within the realm of evidentiality. Recent years have seen increased interest in the analysis of discourse functions of evidential markers, both in languages with grammaticalized evidentiality and those where evidential meanings are expressed by lexical markers (e.g. Fox, 2001, Nuckolls and Michael, 2012, Mushin, 2013, Cornillie, 2010, Cornillie, 2018, Almeida-Alonso, 2015, Cornillie and Gras, 2015, Wiemer and Socka, 2017a, Wiemer and Socka, 2017b, Albelda Marco and Estellés, 2018, Nuckolls, 2018). Attention has been given to the motivation behind the use of evidential markers (e.g. Fox, 2001, Sidnell, 2012, Mushin, 2013), as well as their role in conversation (e.g. Cornillie and Gras, 2015, Nuckolls, 2018). In English, marking the source of information is not obligatory. Therefore, the speaker's decision whether or not to qualify a claim as reported depends on a number of extralinguistic factors, such as the need to signal authority and responsibility for a statement (e.g. Fox, 2001, Hanks, 2012). The term “evidential strategies” used by Aikhenvald (2004) to refer to non-grammatical evidentiality marking may, as pointed out by Hanks (2012: 171), be understood as implying “steps taken on purpose with an aim in view”. In this paper, I examine the strategies connected with the use of reportedly and allegedly.

The meanings and functions of the two adverbs have been discussed in a number of studies (e.g. Ramat, 1996, Wierzbicka, 2006, Celle, 2009, Celle, 2011, Wiemer, 2010), but the contexts and the ways in which their different interpersonal functions are activated have not been systematically examined. This study is intended as a step in that direction. In discussing the interpersonal functions of the two adverbs, I refer to White's (2003), and Martin and White's (2005) typology of “resources of intersubjective positioning,” where the basic function identified for reportative markers is that of attribution. I examine the ways in which the types of attribution distinguished by Martin and White (2005), i.e. acknowledgement and distancing, are expressed by the two adverbs in different contexts, and how, in the case of allegedly, the role of an attribution marker is combined with other functions. Most of the illustrative material used in this study has been excerpted from the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA); individual examples have been collected by the author from other sources.

Section snippets

Reportativity and epistemic modality

A study of reportative adverbs is necessarily concerned with the relation between evidentiality and epistemic modality, which is one of the central issues in research on both categories (e.g. Chafe, 1986, De Haan, 1999, Palmer, 2001 [1986], Nuyts, 2001, Aikhenvald, 2004, McCready and Ogata, 2007, Cornillie, 2009, Portner, 2009, Boye, 2012, Boye, 2018, Narrog, 2012, Déchaine et al., 2017, Wiemer, 2018). Generally speaking, both evidentiality and epistemic modality are concerned with knowledge.

Reportative adverbs

This study focuses on two reportative adverbs, i.e. reportedly and allegedly. They seem to form the core of the category of reportative adverbs in English (the other ones being supposedly, reputedly, apparently – cf. Greenbaum, 1969, Biber et al., 1999, Wierzbicka, 2006), as they both derive from past participles of illocutionary verbs, and as such, they most clearly signal that a claim has been reported to be true by other people. Reportative markers are sometimes discussed under the heading

The data and methodology

To collect data for the present study, I examined the uses of reportedly and allegedly in the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA); only one example comes from a different source (DIUS's Departmental Report, 2008). The two adverbs are well evidenced in both corpora; reportedly has 1452 occurrences in the BNC, and 9057 in the COCA; the frequencies of allegedly are 1039 (BNC), and 8803 (COCA). The COCA provides a particularly good illustration of

Reportedly

As already noted, most accounts associate reportedly with alignment-neutral acknowledgement (e.g. Wierzbicka, 2006, Celle, 2009). Celle argues that “[r]eportedly does not indicate any degree of doubt or certainty, even if such connotations may arise from the text” (Celle, 2009: 283). Alignment-neutral uses of reportedly appear to be substantially more common than those where the adverb expresses distance towards the content of the proposition. Among one hundred random occurrences of reportedly

Summary and conclusions

This study contributes to a more detailed understanding of the functions of reportative markers in discourse by demonstrating that they are used both to signal the status of the information presented by the speaker, as well as to indicate the speaker's position towards the status of the information presented by the interlocutor. It demonstrates that the function of an attribution marker can be combined with other interpersonal functions, such as challenging and countering the interlocutor's

Agata Rozumko is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Modern Languages at the University of Bialystok, Poland. She holds a PhD in English historical linguistics. Her current research is in the area of epistemic modality and evidentiality, with a particular focus on the functions of epistemic adverbs in different types of discourse (both in English and Polish), as well as native and non-native uses of epistemic markers in English.

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    Agata Rozumko is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Modern Languages at the University of Bialystok, Poland. She holds a PhD in English historical linguistics. Her current research is in the area of epistemic modality and evidentiality, with a particular focus on the functions of epistemic adverbs in different types of discourse (both in English and Polish), as well as native and non-native uses of epistemic markers in English.

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