Abstract

This study draws upon the techniques of corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and historical pragmatics to provide an account of the ways in which speakers recruit markers of epistemic stance to capture their construction of the attitudes of their interlocutors, addressees, or audience. It then examines the ways in which selected markers lose their subjective force over time, whether expressive of the speaker’s attitude or the speaker’s sense of the interlocutor’s attitude, to become interactive markers of the exchange involved in an exchange. The article thus tracks the subtle shifts from speaker subjectivity to the speaker’s projection of subjectivity to the addressee, to the association of an expression with the dynamics of the interactive process itself. The article examines instances of semasiological change, that is, changes of meaning associated with the lexical expressions, you know, you see, and you say.