In spoken interaction, participants often refer to their own thoughts and opinions with phrases such as I think, which take the grammatical form of a minimal clause and simultaneously express the speaker’s stance towards upcoming or preceding talk (see, e.g., Thompson and Mulac 1991; Aijmer 1997; Thompson 2002; Kärkkäinen 2003; Keevallik 2010; Mullan and Karlsson 2012). For example, the English complement-taking predicate I think is routinely deployed as a stance-framing device before the speaker presents their point of view (Thompson 2002, 125; Kärkkäinen 2003, 35). However, stance-taking in conversation is not merely a case of quoting a speaker’s pre-formulated thoughts. Consequently, phrases such as I think may also be deployed retroactively to hedge the previous utterance or mark its completion due to, for instance, no uptake from interlocutors (Kärkkäinen 2003, 166; Auer and Lindström 2016, 86). Moreover, formatting upcoming talk as a ‘thought’ can be beneficial for managing the ongoing interaction. For example, in the context of joint decision-making, the construction of a proposal as a thought mitigates imposing on co-participants, which, in turn, allows the co-participants to reply in more open-ended ways (Stevanovic 2013, 521).

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