Stancetaking in spoken ELF discourse in academic settings: interpersonal functions of I don’t know as a face-maintaining strategy

Our study examines interpersonal functions enacted through a stance marker in spoken ELF academic discourse. We specifically focus on investigating the of I don’t know an speech event by embracing pragmatics and sociolinguistics perspective to figure out how it contributes act stancetaking as intersubjective activity. have examined 14 interactions doctoral defense discussions from ELFA corpus. detailed discourse analysis these has revealed five distinctive allowing speakers construct their adopt face-maintaining strategy ongoing discourse: prefacing suggestion, seeking acceptance, hedging/mitigating, checking agreement, expressing uncertainty. Considering highly-context dependent context-regenerated know, our attempts delve into relational aspect communication, thus research this strand disclosing activity with particular