Indexing stance: Reported speech as an interactional evidential¹

<jats:p>The notion of linguistic stance as a non‐grammaticalized form of evidentiality is here explored through an investigation of reported speech in English interaction. Reported speech is found to be one of a variety of resources with which speakers lay claim to epistemic priority <jats:italic>vis‐à‐vis</jats:italic> recipients. Such resources are not identifiable as stance markers independently of the sequential contexts in which they appear; sequential position is shown to be central in providing at once a constraint on what can be said and a resource to exploit in saying it. Resources dependent on sequential position to index stance are deemed to be <jats:italic>interactional</jats:italic> evidentials to distinguish them from the well‐documented <jats:italic>stand‐alone</jats:italic> evidentials. Interactional and stand‐alone evidentials, as forms of deixis, are directed to the orientations of epistemic authority and accountability respectively; their distinct means of marking evidentiality are grounded in the motivation to be explicit with regard to accountability and inexplicit with regard to authority.</jats:p>