TY - JOUR
T1 - Constructing a genre
T2 - Hebrew ('ani) lo yode'a/lo yoda'at '(I) don't know' on Israeli political radio phone-ins
AU - Maschler, Yael
AU - Dori-Hacohen, Gonen
N1 - Funding Information: Acknowledgements: Yael Maschler would like to acknowledge Grant no. 887/12 from the Israel Science Foundation and a Visiting Professorship at the Finnish Center of Excellence in Research on Intersubjectivity in Interaction at the Department of Finnish, Finno-Ugrian, and Scandinavian Studies, University of Helsinki during January and February 2016, which have both enabled completion of this study. The paper was presented at the International Conference on Conversation Analysis (ICCA 2014) at UCLA. Funding Information: Gonen Dori-Hacohen would like to thank the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University and the Lady Davis Fellowship for the visiting professor fellowship during his sabbatical from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst during 2018. Publisher Copyright: © 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston.
PY - 2018/8/28
Y1 - 2018/8/28
N2 - We explore employment of the Hebrew construction ('ani) lo yode'a/lo yoda'at (lit '[I] not m/f-sg.know'), roughly equivalent to English 'I don't know', by callers and hosts in 80 interactions on Israeli political radio phone-in programs, as compared with its functions in casual conversation. Five uses were attested in the corpus of radio phone-ins and correlated with the syntactic form of complementation (if available) for each token of the construction: (i) expressing literal lack of knowledge; (ii) expressing epistemic stance of uncertainty/hedging; (iii) gaining cognitive processing time in the midst of self-repair; (iv) expressing affective stance of contempt or criticism; and (v) avoidance strategies. While most of these uses are common to both genres, some are unattested in casual conversation. By exploring the functions of the ('ani) lo yode'a/lo yoda'at construction and their distribution according to institutional role, the study (i) sheds further light on the use of the construction and its evolvement through use; and (ii) shows how hosts and callers exploit this specific construction in ways that establish the Israeli political radio phone-in institutional genre.
AB - We explore employment of the Hebrew construction ('ani) lo yode'a/lo yoda'at (lit '[I] not m/f-sg.know'), roughly equivalent to English 'I don't know', by callers and hosts in 80 interactions on Israeli political radio phone-in programs, as compared with its functions in casual conversation. Five uses were attested in the corpus of radio phone-ins and correlated with the syntactic form of complementation (if available) for each token of the construction: (i) expressing literal lack of knowledge; (ii) expressing epistemic stance of uncertainty/hedging; (iii) gaining cognitive processing time in the midst of self-repair; (iv) expressing affective stance of contempt or criticism; and (v) avoidance strategies. While most of these uses are common to both genres, some are unattested in casual conversation. By exploring the functions of the ('ani) lo yode'a/lo yoda'at construction and their distribution according to institutional role, the study (i) sheds further light on the use of the construction and its evolvement through use; and (ii) shows how hosts and callers exploit this specific construction in ways that establish the Israeli political radio phone-in institutional genre.
KW - Hebrew interactional linguistics
KW - Mental verb constructions
KW - affective and epistemic stance
KW - avoidance strategies
KW - hedging
KW - self-repair
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85052129655&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1515/text-2018-0015
DO - 10.1515/text-2018-0015
M3 - Article
SN - 1860-7330
VL - 38
SP - 575
EP - 604
JO - Text and Talk
JF - Text and Talk
IS - 5
ER -