Stance Adverbials in Spoken English Interactions: Insights from Corpora of L1 and L2 Elicited Conversations

This paper adopts corpus-based methods to investigate how adverbial stance markers are used in the Swedish and in the Italian EFL LINDSEI sub-corpora and in the L1 English LOCNEC comparable corpus (Gilquin et al. 2010). Inspired by research on corpus pragmatics, conversation analysis, learner corpus research and EFL pedagogy, the quantitative and qualitative investigations focus on stance adverbials in turn-initial and final position. The results reveal that the Italian learners use such markers significantly less frequently than the native speakers and the Swedish learners in both positions. However, differently from the Swedish and the Italian groups, the L1 group employs the adverbials mainly in final position and makes use of a wider repertoire of them to make more meanings. The study also explores how stance adverbials can contribute to discourse management in combination with other linguistic elements, and discusses implications of these and other findings for EFL pedagogy.