Uncertainty markers in spoken learner discourse

The paper discusses linguistic forms conveying epistemic stance in L2 spoken production, focusing on expressing uncertainty. The source of stance markers is a subset of the Corpus of Czech Students’ Spoken English, particularly informal student-student discussions on a given topic. The main aim of the corpus analysis is to identify a variety of grammatical devices indicating the speaker’s uncertainty about the truth-value of a proposition and to examine their distributional patterns and positional preferences. Additionally, the paper explores roles of the construction I think, the most frequent stance marker in the discussions analysed. The findings indicate that Czech learners of English tend to employ a restricted set of items recurrently and use I think not only to express uncertainty but also to mitigate potential disagreement and signal turn-taking.