Current Conceptions of Stance

Abstract

The linguistic mechanisms that convey a speaker or writer’s personal attitudes and assessments have long been of interest to linguists, and several major approaches to this function of language have been taken. In this chapter we survey several related threads of research, including evidentiality (e.g. Chafe, 1986), affect (e.g. Ochs and Schieffelin, 1989), hedging (e.g. Hyland, 1998b), evaluation (e.g. Thompson and Hunston, 2000), appraisal (e.g. Martin, 2000) and stance (e.g. Biber and Finegan, 1989). While each paradigm has its own focus and approach, this body of research as a whole contributes to our understanding of the ways in which speakers and writers encode opinions and assessments in the language they produce. In this chapter, we will refer to this overall concept as stance. Studies within these paradigms have been conducted with a variety of methodologies, ranging from detailed analyses of a single text to largescale investigations of patterns across texts in a corpus, as well as from detailed analyses of a single linguistic item or feature to descriptions of a large set of lexical and grammatical features. Taken together, these studies show that the expression of stance varies along two major parameters: meaning of the assessment: personal feeling/attitude H status of knowledge linguistic level used for the assessment: lexical H grammatical These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as…