Mediating through question-asking: A sociopragmatic analysis of epistemic stance negotiation in everyday conversation

This study examines the role of questions in the negotiation of epistemic stance in diffuse mediation contexts. Diffuse mediation arises in various informal situations, for example, between friends seeking to re-establish relationships that are at risk, or relatives trying to resolve family conflicts. In fact, the stronger the social bonds, the greater the scope for this form of conflict resolution (Greco-Morasso, 2011; Berger, 2018). We hypothesise that third-parties acting as mediators in informal conversations are seldom fully aware of their role, and hence that they often show their point of view in attempting to resolve a conflict. Thus, we argue that a mediator's epistemic stance negotiation not only contributes to establishing common ground, but also reflects their own subjectivity (Jacobs, 2002; Fraser, 2007). Towards confirming this, the study presents an analysis of data from the Val.Es.Co. corpus, which comprises 78 conversations with a total duration of approximately 1465 min. From this material, our quantitative and qualitative analysis will focus on those conversational sequences in which a situation of informal mediation can be observed, a total of 38 sequences amounting to 64 min of dialogue. The results confirm that pragmatic strategies such as question-asking have a crucial role here, due to the negotiation of meanings and the cognitive alignment that is expected to occur during the conflict. The findings show that by asking questions, the mediator can redirect the issue to other topics, foster the negotiation of epistemic stance, and establish common ground between participants. Likewise, it is observed that situational and social knowledge in a specific context become essential in the process of diffuse mediation in everyday conversation.