Taking a Stance: a Corpus Study of Reported Speech

People tend to avoid exposed disagreement in conversation. This is normally attributed to politeness strategies that mitigate the potential face-threat created by direct disagreement with a conversational partner. In reported speech the pressure for mitigation of negative responses is removed, leading to the prediction that reported speech should contain more exposed disagreement. However, concerns about self-presentation may lead people to present their prior behaviour in such a way that demonstrates their understanding that disagreement is a sensitive matter; thus, differences in self-reported and other-reported disagreement would be anticipated. Finally, we predict that reported speech is used to highlight substantive differences in stance, and contains more explicit markers of stance to highlight newsworthiness. To test these ideas we compare the distribution of markers of agreement, disagreement and stance in four samples of conversation from the BNC: direct speech, self-reported speech (I said), other-reported speech (he / she said) and local dialogue context. Contrary to the prediction the results show that both direct and indirect markers of agreement and disagreement are more common in direct speech than reported speech. However, markers of contrast and emphasis including negations, swearwords and contrastive conjuncts are both more common in reported speech than direct speech and in self-reported speech than other-reported speech.