Epistemicity and stance in English and other European languages: discourse-pragmatic perspectives

ENThis introduction to the special issue on epistemicity and stance provides an overview of epistemic stance resources in a number of European languages, with a focus on discourse-pragmatic meanings and uses. Epistemicity is viewed as a conceptual domain which includes the subcategories of epistemic modality and evidentiality. The contributions in this issue discuss a number of pragmatic features and properties of the expressions under analysis, thus adding to existing knowledge: multifunctionality, interpersonal rapport, facework, discourse functions and joint effects with expressions of other types of stance. An outline of the special issue is also provided, including a summary of all the contributions.