ABSTRACT
From the semantic point of view, verba dicendi belong to the broader category of "verbs of cognition" and they involve an act of conveying information by the speaker, who mentally "possesses" it, to the addressee, who is transferred from the state of "not knowing" the information to the state of "possessing" it. The study reported here is based on 32 transcripts (totalling 1,484,574 words, including metadata) from the David Irving v. Penguin Books Ltd and Deborah Lipstadt trial. It may be convincingly argued that some phraseologies with the present progressive of verba dicendi are an important stancetaking resource, whose evaluative potential in courtroom talk should not be ignored. Intersubjective positioning strategies resist automatic detection and, like the evaluation which they subsume, they are dispersed and "parasitic" on various structures. While some attitudinal phenomena can indeed be identified in corpus-assisted analyses, some things, admittedly, will not be achieved.
