Cover not available
Part of
Self- and Other-Reference in Social Contexts: From global to local discourses
Edited by Minna Nevala and Minna Palander-Collin
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 342] 2024
► pp. 14–38

Chapter 2
Personal conviction against general knowledge

Epistemic commitment in online discussions of climate change

| University of Helsinki
This study analyses the functions of I know and we know in online discussions of climate change. These phrases locate the writer through the first-person pronouns and indicate epistemic certainty through the private verb know. The constructions are analysed in a corpus of climate change-related posts on the social media sites Twitter (currently X) and Reddit. As the writers discuss and argue for or against climate change being an environmental threat, I know and we know mark the writer’s subjective evaluation and how they position themselves with a like-minded audience: I know has interpersonal functions and we know is used to emphasise certainty by attributing knowledge to a larger epistemic community. This construction of knowledge situates the writer in the broader ideological climate debate.
Keywords: epistemic stance, subjectivity, intersubjectivity, climate change, social media, Twitter (X), Reddit
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical context
  • 3.Materials and methods
    • 3.1Communication on social media platforms
    • 3.2Corpus collection and analysis
  • 4.Functions identified
    • 4.1Epistemic certainty
      • 4.1.1Personal commitment
      • 4.1.2Collective commitment
    • 4.2Interpersonal functions
      • 4.2.1Interpersonal hedging
      • 4.2.2Empathy
    • 4.3Pragmatic marker
  • 5.Variation of functions in context
    • 5.1Comparing I and we as author perspectives
    • 5.2Comparison of subcorpora
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 March 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.342.02bir
References (79)
References
Adolphs, Svenja, and Yaoyao Chen. 2021. “Corpus Pragmatics.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics, ed. by Michael Haugh, Dániel Z Kádár, and Marina Terkourafi, 639–662. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Agius, Christine, Annika Bergman Rosamond, and Catarina Kinnvall. 2020. “Populism, Ontological Insecurity and Gendered Nationalism: Masculinity, Climate Denial and Covid-19.” Politics, Religion & Ideology 21 (4): 432–450. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Aijmer, Karin. 1997. “I Think – an English Modal Particle.” In Modality in Germanic Languages, ed. by Toril Swan, and Olaf J. Westvik, 1–48. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Anderson, Ashley A., and Heidi E. Huntington. 2017. “Social Media, Science, and Attack Discourse: How Twitter Discussions of Climate Change Use Sarcasm and Incivility.” Science Communication 39 (5): 598–620. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Andi, Simge. 2020. “How People Access News about Climate Change.” In Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2020, ed. by Nic Newman, Richard Fletcher, Anne Schulz, Simge Andı, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, 52–57. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. [URL].Google Scholar
Arlt, Dorothee, Imke Hoppe, Josephine B Schmitt, Fenja De Silva-Schmidt, and Michael Brüggemann. 2018. “Climate Engagement in a Digital Age: Exploring the Drivers of Participation in Climate Discourse Online in the Context of COP21.” Environmental Communication 12 (1): 84–98. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baumgarten, Nicole, and Juliane House. 2010. “I Think and I Don’t Know in English as Lingua Franca and Native English Discourse.” Journal of Pragmatics 42 (5): 1184–1200. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Beeching, Kate. 2016. Pragmatic Markers in British English: Meaning in Social Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biri, Ylva. 2021. “Metadiscourse in Social Media: A Reflexive Framework.” In Metadiscourse in Digital Communication: New Research, Approaches and Methodologies, ed. by Larissa D’Angelo, Anna Mauranen, and Stefania Maci, 133–154. Cham: Springer International. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bois, John W. Du. 2007. “The Stance Triangle.” In Stancetaking in Discourse, ed. by Robert Englebretson, 139–182. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brinton, Laurel J. 2017. The Evolution of Pragmatic Markers in English: Pathways of Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cappelli, Gloria. 2007. “I Reckon I Know How Leonardo Da Vinci Must Have Felt …”: Epistemicity, Evidentiality and English Verbs of Cognitive Attitude. Pari: Pari Publishing.Google Scholar
Chafe, Wallace. 1986. “Evidentiality in English Conversation and Academic Writing.” In Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology, edited by Wallace Chafe, and Johanna Nichols, 261–272. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation.Google Scholar
Clark, Herbert H. 1996. Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clarke, Isobelle. 2022. “A Multi-Dimensional Analysis of English Tweets.” Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 31 (2): 124–149. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Coesemans, Roel, and Barbara De Cock. 2017. “Self-Reference by Politicians on Twitter: Strategies to Adapt to 140 Characters.” Journal of Pragmatics 116: 37–50. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
DeLancey, Scott. 2001. “The Mirative and Evidentiality.” Journal of Pragmatics 33 (3): 369–382. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dijk, Teun A. van. 2014. Discourse and Knowledge: A Sociocognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dindar, Muhterem, and Nihal Dulkadir Yaman. 2018. “#IUseTwitterBecause: Content Analytic Study of a Trending Topic in Twitter.” Information Technology & People 31 (1): 256–277. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dunlap, Riley E., and Aaron M. McCright. 2010. “Climate Change Denial: Sources, Actors and Strategies.” In Routledge Handbook of Climate Change and Society, ed. by Constance Lever-Tracy, 240–259. Milton Park: Routledge.Google Scholar
Fetzer, Anita. 2014. “I Think, I Mean and I Believe in Political Discourse: Collocates, Functions and Distribution.” Functions of Language 21 (1): 67–94. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Friginal, Eric, Oksana Waugh, and Ashley Titak. 2017. “Linguistic Variation in Facebook and Twitter Posts.” In Studies in Corpus-Based Sociolinguistics, ed. by Eric Friginal, 342–362. New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gibson, Anna. 2019. “Free Speech and Safe Spaces: How Moderation Policies Shape Online Discussion Spaces.” Social Media + Society 5 (1): 205630511983258. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
González, Montserrat, Paolo Roseano, Joan Borràs-Comes, and Pilar Prieto. 2017. “Epistemic and Evidential Marking in Discourse: Effects of Register and Debatability.” Lingua 186–187 (January): 68–87. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Guy, Sophie, Yoshihisa Kashima, Iain Walker, and Saffron O’Neill. 2014. “Investigating the Effects of Knowledge and Ideology on Climate Change Beliefs.” European Journal of Social Psychology 44 (5): 421–429. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hausfather, Zeke, Henri F. Drake, Tristan Abbott, and Gavin A. Schmidt. 2020. “Evaluating the Performance of Past Climate Model Projections.” Geophysical Research Letters 47 (January). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heritage, John. 2012. “Epistemics in Action: Action Formation and Territories of Knowledge.” Research on Language & Social Interaction 45 (1): 1–29. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hobson, Kersty, and Simon Niemeyer. 2013. “‘What Sceptics Believe’: The Effects of Information and Deliberation on Climate Change Scepticism.” Public Understanding of Science 22 (4): 396–412. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Holmes, Janet. 1986. “Functions of You Know in Women’s and Men’s Speech.” Language in Society 15 (1): 1–22. . DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1988. “Of Course: A Pragmatic Particle in New Zealand Women’s and Men’s Speech∗.” Australian Journal of Linguistics 8 (1): 49–74. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hosch-Dayican, Bengü. 2014. “Online Political Activities as Emerging Forms of Political Participation: How Do They Fit in the Conceptual Map?” Acta Politica 49 (3): 342–346. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hulleberg Johansen, Stine. 2019. “Exploring the Use of Probes in a Corpus Pragmatic Study of Hedging Strategies.” Nordic Journal of English Studies 18 (1): 121–148. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hyland, Ken. 2001. “Humble Servants of the Discipline? Self-Mention in Research Articles.” English for Specific Purposes 20 (3): 207–226. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2005. Metadiscourse: Exploring Interaction in Writing. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Ihm, Jennifer, and Eun-mee Kim. 2018. “The Hidden Side of News Diffusion: Understanding Online News Sharing as an Interpersonal Behavior.” New Media & Society 20 (11): 4346–4365. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jaidka, Kokil, Alvin Zhou, and Yphtach Lelkes. 2019. “Brevity Is the Soul of Twitter: The Constraint Affordance and Political Discussion.” Journal of Communication 69 (4): 345–372. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kacewicz, Ewa, James W. Pennebaker, Matthew Davis, Moongee Jeon, and Arthur C. Graesser. 2014. “Pronoun Use Reflects Standings in Social Hierarchies.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 33 (2): 125–143. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kahan, Dan M., Ellen Peters, Maggie Wittlin, Paul Slovic, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, Donald Braman, and Gregory Mandel. 2012. “The Polarizing Impact of Science Literacy and Numeracy on Perceived Climate Change Risks.” Nature Climate Change 2 (10): 732–735. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kamio, Akio. 1997. Territory of Information. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2007. “The Role of I Guess in Conversational Stancetaking.” In Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction, ed. by Robert Englebretson, 183–219. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kitagawa, Chisato, and Adrienne Lehrer. 1990. “Impersonal Uses of Personal Pronouns.” Journal of Pragmatics 14 (5): 739–759. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kittilä, Seppo. 2019. “General Knowledge as an Evidential Category.” Linguistics 57 (6): 1271–1304. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kovaka, Karen. 2021. “Climate Change Denial and Beliefs about Science.” Synthese 198 (3): 2355–2374. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leombruni, Lisa V. 2015. “How You Talk about Climate Change Matters: A Communication Network Perspective on Epistemic Skepticism and Belief Strength.” Global Environmental Change 35 (November): 148–161. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leuckert, Sven, and Martin Leuckert. 2020. “Towards a Digital Sociolinguistics: Communities of Practice on Reddit.” In Corpus Approaches to Social Media, ed. by Sofia Rüdiger, and Daria Dayter, 15–40. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Liimatta, Aatu. 2019. “Exploring Register Variation on Reddit.” Register Studies 1 (2): 269–295. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Manning, Christopher D, Mihai Surdeanu, John Bauer, Jenny Finkel, Steven J Bethard, and David Mcclosky. 2014. “The Stanford CoreNLP Natural Language Processing Toolkit.” In Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations, 55–60. DOI logo
Marín-Arrese, Juana I. 2013. “Stancetaking and Inter/Subjectivity in the Iraq Inquiry: Blair vs. Brown.” In English Modality: Core, Periphery and Evidentiality, ed. by Juana I. Marín-Arrese, Marta Carretero, Jorge Arús Hita, and Johan van der Auwera, 411–445. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Markham, Annette, and Elizabeth Buchanan. 2012. “Ethical Decision-Making and Internet Research Recommendations from the AoIR Ethics Working Committee (Version 2.0).” [URL].
Medimorec, Srdan, and Gordon Pennycook. 2015. “The Language of Denial: Text Analysis Reveals Differences in Language Use between Climate Change Proponents and Skeptics.” Climatic Change 133 (4): 597–605. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Moore, Carrie, and Lisa Chuang. 2017. “Redditors Revealed: Motivational Factors of the Reddit Community.” In Proceedings of the 50th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2313–2322. [URL].
Mühlhäusler, Peter, and Rom Harré. 1990. Pronouns and People: The Linguistic Construction of Social and Personal Identity. Language in Society. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Myers, Krista F., Peter T. Doran, John Cook, John E. Kotcher, and Teresa A. Myers. 2021. “Consensus Revisited: Quantifying Scientific Agreement on Climate Change and Climate Expertise among Earth Scientists 10 Years Later.” Environmental Research Letters 16 (10): 104030. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Narrog, Heiko. 2016. “Three Types of Subjectivity, Three Types of Intersubjectivity, Their Dynamicization and a Synthesis.” In Aspects of Grammaticalization: (Inter)Subjectification and Directionality, ed. by Daniel Olmen, Hubert Cuyckens, and Lobke Ghesquière, 19–46. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nuyts, Jan. 2001. “Subjectivity as an Evidential Dimension in Epistemic Modal Expressions.” Journal of Pragmatics 33 (3): 383–400. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Östman, Jan-Ola. 1981. You Know: A Discourse-Functional Study. Pragmatics & Beyond. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pavlidou, Theodossia-Soula. 2014. “Constructing Collectivity with ‘We.’” In Constructing Collectivity: “We” across Languages and Contexts, ed. by Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou, 1–19. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Phua, Joe, Seunga Venus Jin, and Jihoon (Jay) Kim. 2017. “Uses and Gratifications of Social Networking Sites for Bridging and Bonding Social Capital: A Comparison of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat.” Computers in Human Behavior 72 (July): 115–122. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Põldvere, Nele, Matteo Fuoli, and Carita Paradis. 2016. “A Study of Dialogic Expansion and Contraction in Spoken Discourse Using Corpus and Experimental Techniques.” Corpora 11 (2): 191–225. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Qi, Peng, Yuhao Zhang, Yuhui Zhang, Jason Bolton, and Christopher D. Manning. 2020. “Stanza: A Python Natural Language Processing Toolkit for Many Human Languages,” Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations, 101–108. Association for Computational Linguistics. DOI logo
Robards, Brady. 2018. “Belonging and Neo-Tribalism on Social Media Site Reddit.” In Neo-Tribes: Consumption, Leisure and Tourism, ed. by Anne Hardy, Andy Bennett, and Brady Robards, 187–206. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rühlemann, Christoph, and Karin Aijmer. 2014. “Corpus Pragmatics: Laying the Foundations.” In Corpus Pragmatics, ed. by Karin Aijmer, and Christoph Rühlemann, 1–26. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Smiley, Kevin T. 2017. “Climate Change Denial, Political Beliefs, and Cities: Evidence from Copenhagen and Houston.” Environmental Sociology 3 (1): 76–86. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Suau-Jiménez, Francisca. 2014. “Dialogic Voices of Writers and Readers in Traveller Forums through Interpersonality.” In Dialogicity in Written Specialized Genres, ed. by Luz Gil-Salom, and Carmen Soler-Monreal, 137–164. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Szczyrbak, Magdalena. 2019. “Epistemic Stance in the Kavanaugh Confirmation Hearing: Focus on Mental and Communication Verbs.” Discourse and Interaction 12 (2): 72–94. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Titak, Ashley, and Audrey Roberson. 2013. “Dimensions of Web Registers: An Exploratory Multi-Dimensional Comparison.” Corpora 8 (2): 235–260. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Toma, Catalina L., and Jonathan D. D’Angelo. 2015. “Tell-Tale Words: Linguistic Cues Used to Infer the Expertise of Online Medical Advice.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 34 (1): 25–45. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Toulmin, Stephen. 2003. The Uses of Argument. Updated ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tranter, Bruce, and Kate Booth. 2015. “Scepticism in a Changing Climate: A Cross-National Study.” Global Environmental Change 33 (July): 154–164. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1995. “Subjectification in Grammaticalisation.” In Subjectivity and Subjectivisation: Linguistic Perspectives, ed. by Dieter Stein, and Susan Wright, 31–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vassileva, Irena. 2001. “Commitment and Detachment in English and Bulgarian Academic Writing.” English for Specific Purposes 20 (1): 83–102. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vulpe, Simona–Nicoleta. 2020. “Cooling down the Future. A Discourse Analysis of Climate Change Skepticism.” The Social Science Journal, December, 1–17. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Weatherall, Ann. 2011. “I Don’t Know as a Prepositioned Epistemic Hedge.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 44 (4): 317–337. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
World Meteorological Organization. 2022. “State of the Global Climate 2021 (WMO-No. 1290).” Geneva. [URL].
Zappavigna, Michele. 2011. “Ambient Affiliation: A Linguistic Perspective on Twitter.” New Media & Society 13 (5): 788–806. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2014. “CoffeeTweets: Bonding around the Bean on Twitter.” In The Language of Social Media, ed. by Philip Seargeant, and Caroline Tagg, 139–160. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. DOI logoGoogle Scholar