Affective Stance Research Articles

Conventionalized impoliteness formulae in third-party assessments

Abstract The paper examines the ideological work accomplished by the use of conventionalized impoliteness formulae in third person reference, when the person being criticized or brought into disrepute is not present in the here-and-now of interaction. Drawing on Interactional Linguistics and data from audio-recorded informal face-to-face Greek conversations, the study shows that speakers mobilize conventionalized impoliteness formulae, along with other linguistic resources, in the course of third-party assessments to evaluate sociocultural experience, and establish interlocutors’ shared negative affective stance toward the third party picked on due to their national group membership. This practice reproduces everyday nationalism that unites offenders against national ‘others’. The study enhances our understanding of the recontextualization of conventionalized impoliteness formulae in talk-in-interaction, and the role of affective stance in the discursive formation of (national) identities.

Semiotic Packaging of Teacher Talk for Affective Recyclings: A Usage-Based Approach to Children’s Construction Development

This study examines how iconically designed teacher talk facilitates preschool novice L2 learners’ construction development through playful interactions. It combines two approaches: ethnomethodological conversation analysis and usage-based linguistics. The conversational data were retrieved from teacher-children interactions filmed at an all-English school in Japan. The microanalysis of 945-minute classroom interactions illustrated that when a part of teacher talk was packaged with iconic semiotic resources, such as gestures, situated meanings, tones of voice, and affective stances, it became accessible L2 resources for the children to learn and recycle in their subsequent utterances. Simultaneously, the analysis also revealed the pragmatic mechanism of teachers’ assignment of interactional responsibility, inviting children to perform language learning of target constructions through recyclings. The recycled part of the teacher talk indicated the children’s microgenetic usage-based language learning as they modified and developed L2 constructions to accomplish certain social actions—sanction of a deviated action, attention-getting, and storytelling in situ. This study indicates that language learning opportunities can be integrated into children’s processes of achieving specific social actions, and language learning performance can be invited as an appropriate practice in situ by certain teacher talk designs.

Comparative analysis of interactional metadiscursive resources in academic writing by L2 and L1 English writers

Interactional Metadicursive Resources (IMRs) are established as the most common rhetorical features that assist writers in achieving interaction with the discourse community. The purpose of this study was to compare the use of IMRs in research articles (RAs) authored by Yemeni L2 writers and L1 English writers, while also examining the extent to which both groups employ these resources to achieve persuasive purposes. Based on Hyland’s (2019) model, AntConc was used as an analytical tool in a corpus-based methodology to analyze the use of IMRs in their context of use, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Moreover, Swales’ models were adapted to identify rhetorical moves in the different sections of RAs. The findings indicate that L1 writers tended to use IMRs more frequently and effectively to pursue ethos and pathos. However, Yemeni L2 writers tended to use IMRs sparingly, lacking familiarity with their persuasive role. L1 writers tended to express epistemic and affective stances and used these resources throughout their research, while Yemeni L2 writers tended to focus more on propositional content, using limited IMRs in their writing. Furthermore, unlike L1 English writers, who tended to negotiate their claims in the RA introduction and engage their audience in the RA conclusion, Yemeni L2 writers almost exclusively strengthened their line of argument when initiating and concluding their research. The study concludes by discussing the pedagogical implications of the effective use of IMRs in L2 academic writing.

That-complement clauses signalling stance in Nigerian Supreme Court lead judgements: a corpus-based study

Abstract The study investigates grammatical means of marking stance in Nigerian Supreme Court lead judgements. Specifically, it examines the frequency, form and stance functions of that-complement clauses in lead judgements using Du Bios’ stance triangle model (Du Bois, John. 2007. The stance triangle. In Englebretson Robert (ed.), Stancetaking in discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction, 139–177. Amsterdam: John Benjamins) and Biber’s (Biber, Douglas. 2006. University language: A corpus-based study of spoken and written registers. Amsterdam: John Benjamins) semantic domains of verbal and adjectival predicates controlling that-complement clauses. The study shows that that-complement clauses in the lead judgements are predominantly verb-based and they mainly signal epistemic and few alignment stances. Verb-based that-clauses are largely indexed by communication verbs which report prior stances, present the lead judges’ arguments and validate them. Adjective-based that-clauses signal evaluative and few affective stances. They are frequently signalled by certainty adjectives which express lead judges’ certitude on the issues argued. That-complement clauses signal few alignment stances and yet fewer affective ones, possibly due to judges’ need to assert their authoritative voice as experts in the discourse community. The frequency of certainty verbs and adjectives in the that-complement clauses underscores the centrality of certitude in judicial argumentation. I suggest that judgements are not only evaluative as has been noted in earlier studies but also epistemic based on the predominance of epistemic and certainty markers lexico-grammatically realised and indexed by verb and adjective based that-clauses.

Acoustic indicators of voice quality in the context of social support

Is social support communicated throught the subtle, yet powerful, acoustic variations in speech? This study attempted to answer this question by testing whether acoustic parameters vary when expressing social support. Participants underwent an experiment in which they watched video testimonials of a woman describing either a neutral subject or a sensitive, emotionally-charged experience. After this, participants provided voice messages to the person appearing in the testimony. Employing the openSMILE toolkit, we extracted from these speech responses the Geneva Minimalistic Acoustic Parameter Set (GeMAPS), a set of emotion-related acoustic features. Our investigation reveals an acoustic profile characteristic of supportive speech, distinguished by changes in the Alpha ratio, spectral slope, and the Hammarberg index — parameters representing the high-frequency content and spectral balance. These acoustic differences not only help to differentiate supportive utterances but also characterize its voice quality, thereby enhancing the emotional richness of this affective stance. Our research findings have potential applications in therapeutic and communication settings and open avenues for further exploration in speech science.

Can't read my broker face?—Tracing a motif and metaphor of expert knowledge through audiovisual images of the financial crisis

AbstractBased on the question of the representability of economy and economics in audiovisual media, developments on the financial markets have often been discussed as a depiction problem. The abstractness and complexity of economic interrelations seem to defy classical modes of storytelling and dramatization. Nevertheless, public opinion about economic changes and dependencies crucially relies on audiovisual media. But how can the public communicate in images, sounds, and words about forces that are out of sight and out of reach, and can supposedly only be adequately grasped by experts? In a case study on audiovisual images of the global financial crisis (2007–), this paper tracks and analyzes a recurring motif: the staging of expert knowledge as close‐ups of expressive faces vis‐à‐vis computer screens in television news, documentaries, as well as feature films. It draws on the use of digital tools for corpus exploration (reverse image search) and the visualization of video annotations. By relating and comparing different staging strategies by which these “broker faces” become embodiments of turbulent market dynamics, the paper proposes to not regard them as repeated instantiations of the same metaphor, but as a developing web of cinematic metaphors. Different perspectives (news of market developments or historical accounts of crisis developments) and affective stances toward the global financial crisis are expressed in these variations of the face‐screen constellation. The paper thus presents a selection of different appearances of “broker faces” as a medium for an audiovisual discourse of the global financial crisis. A concluding analysis of a scene from Margin Call focuses on its specific intertwining of expert and screen as an ambivalent movement figuration of staging insight. Between the feeling of discovery (of a potential future threat) and the sense of being haunted (by a menacing force), the film stages the emergence of a “broker face” in an atmospheric tension between suspense and melancholy. We argue that the film thereby reframes the motif and poses questions of agency, temporality, and expert knowledge.

Alienation, Engagement, and Welfare

Abstract The alienation constraint on theories of well-being has been influentially expressed thus: ‘what is intrinsically valuable for a person must have a connection with what he would find in some degree compelling or attractive …. It would be an intolerably alienated conception of someone's good to imagine that it might fail in any such way to engage him’. Many agree this claim expresses something true, but there is little consensus on how exactly the constraint is to be understood. Here, I clarify the sense in which the quote offers a basic constraint on theories of well-being—a constraint that should be adopted by (e.g.) hedonists, desire satisfactionists, and objective list theorists alike. This constraint focuses on affective engagement, or positive affective stances in connection with a proposed good. I show that the constraint explains a near-universal intuition, and rules out a number of well-known theories of well-being.

Ein Lothar Matthäus braucht keine dritte Person . Personennamen mit Indefinitartikel als Stancemarker in Politikerreden und Fußballblogs

Abstract This paper presents a corpus study of political debates and soccer blogs, illustrating that personal names can be combined with indefinite articles, particularly when referring to prominent figures (e.g., ein Donald Trump or ein Lothar Matthäus). The pattern frequently carries a generic meaning, indicating a reading to the effect of ‘someone like Donald Trump’. Additionally, there are instances in which the pattern denotes a specific and even definite referent. These definite-specific usages regularly occur in both genres but are particularly prevalent in soccer blogs, especially in sections featuring discussions among soccer fans who are not professional writers. The usage of ein + personal name is so common and strongly associated with the language of soccer fans that it functions as a variant of bare personal names, serving as a contextualization cue. By utilizing the pattern ein + personal name, speakers can signal their belonging to the group of soccer fans (doing being a soccer fan) and, in doing so, take a stance on the same group (style stance). Furthermore, all usages have in common that they convey an affective stance toward the person bearing the name, who is either positively or negatively evaluated depending on the context.

From lack of understanding to heightened engagement: A multimodal study of Hebrew ′ATA LO MEVIN ‘You don’t understand’

Abstract This study explores the Hebrew ′ATA LO MEVIN (‘you don’t understand’) construction in a corpus of casual conversation. Employing the methodology of Interactional Linguistics and Multimodal Conversation Analysis, we show that deployment of this construction is fixed and formulaic and only rarely denotes the recipient’s lack of understanding. Based on a mostly synchronic analysis, we suggest a grammaticization path followed by this construction from a negative epistemic subject-predicate construction denoting literal lack of understanding to a discourse marker signaling the opening of a new narrative, while seeking recipient alignment with the speaker’s intensified affective stance. The path described reveals that embodied conduct, as well as prosodic, morphophonological, and syntactic features of the construction correlate with the weakening of its literal meaning. This sheds light on the uses speakers make of the construction, on how heightened engagement may be achieved in discourse, and on the dialogic nature of interaction and grammar.

'Her dreadful plight': A corpus-assisted analysis of the indexical and stance properties of <em>poor thing</em>

Curiously, the English multiword expression poor thing (henceforth PT) often refers to entities that are neither economically impoverished nor inanimate objects. By using a mixed-methods corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis approach, we demonstrate that PT functions as an expression of affective stance based on evidence from two American English corpora. In cases where the social identities of speakers and referents can be determined, PT is frequently used by women and in reference to women, children, or animals. Additionally, the expression may refer to entities of low vitality due to illness or death. Our results indicate that PT conveys a complex social meaning by indexing a speaker’s compassionate stance alongside a referent’s misfortune, bundling together a set of (stereo)typically ‘disempowered’ personae. This analysis demonstrates the potential of corpus-based CDA investigations which analyze relatively infrequent lexical expressions that, nonetheless, have recognizable social meaning for speakers.

Affective stance as positioning in an English-speaking online fan community

This study analyses how affective stance is used for evaluation and positioning in fan discourse. Adopting a corpus-based approach, the paper focuses on affective stance verbs in an English-speaking popular media fandom on three social media platforms, Twitter, Tumblr, and Reddit. Fans use affective stance to construct positions in relation to the popular media franchise, in this case a popular Japanese manga and anime series. By combining quantitative and qualitative linguistic analysis the study shows that stancetaking verbalises fans’ investment in the fictional world of the narrative media, in the franchise production, and in the context of fan productivity. The discursively constructed positions reflect common fan practices such as publicising fan affect and emotions, reviewing the franchise critically, and sharing textual fan productivity. The analysis associates platform differences with the social norms of the fans and the technological affordances that enable their interaction. Because hashtag-based interaction on micro-blogs is primarily indirect, the study argues that the interactive functions of stance can be understood in relation to the general fandom affect.

The functional spectrum of the Turkish pragmatic marker Ya

The corpus-driven study explores the functional spectrum of the Turkish pragmatic marker ya. Including functional, syntactic and collocational discussions, it reveals that ya often functions in the interpersonal domain, reflecting the speaker's usually negative affective stance. The study indicates that ya acts as a reminder of shared knowledge to avoid communication glitches. In the textual/sequential domain, ya is used as a topic initiator, shifter and expander. Its longer form, yaa has an idiosyncratic summative function, signalling topic termination after the speaker has satisfactorily enlightened an issue. At the utterance-medial position, ya marks the preceding segment as a reason clause, often reflecting unfavourable attitudes. In appeal intonation, ya sounds like a marker of hastener for requests to negotiate desired actions. As an emotional response token it reflects negative attitudes like annoyance, dismay, impatience or disbelief. Marginally, ya is an assertive marker allied to condemnatory wh-questions to criticise someone or functions as a tag question for negative anchors. It was also found that ya forms several collocation patterns that disambiguate some pragmatic functions.

Sequential positions and interactional functions of negative epistemic constructions in Japanese conversation

Abstract In this study, we adopted the methodology of conversation analysis and interactional linguistics to investigate the use of shiranai and wakannai ‘I don’t know’ in data from (the Corpus of Everyday Japanese Conversation), a corpus of naturally occurring conversations. The quantitative and qualitative analyses of the sequential positions and the interactional functions of these two expressions revealed that shiranai is often used as a response to a question that explicitly requests knowledge status. Shiranai is also used in response to informing, soliciting more talk from the interlocutor. On the other hand, wakannai is more often used as a response to a question that requests information. Used with prosodic features such as elongation and laughter, both shiranai and wakannai sometimes convey the speaker’s affective stance towards the lack of knowledge. Furthermore, wakannai can be used as a discourse marker to mark the speaker’s low degree of commitment, sometimes working as a sequence-closing device.

Comparative urbanism for hope and healing: Urbicide and the dilemmas of reconstruction in post-war Syria and Poland

This paper expands the repertoire of comparative urbanism by putting forward a method of ‘hopeful comparison’, in which we explore an asynchronous comparison between post-war Poland and Syria. Similar to the way that Polish architects used urban design as a ‘practice of hope’ during the Second World War, contemporary Syrian architects are now drafting reconstruction plans even if their implementation does not seem politically possible. Yet what role can an ethical, affective stance such as hope play in the methodology of comparative urbanism? In our comparative strategy the role of radical hope is threefold. First, it creates the comparative connection between two cities destroyed by urbicide, thus countering the destructive connectivities of war and, in case of Syria, capitalism, and foregrounding resilience and human connection (which also opens up the potential of healing). Second, radical hope provides a temporal reorientation of knowledge, redirecting the analysis from the traumatic past towards an open future. Third, in this way a hopeful comparison becomes a practical tool for thinking through concrete ethical and political dilemmas concerning reconstruction and property regimes. How to think about reconstruction when the conflict is still ongoing, and, if the property system is now weaponised as part of the conflict, how to avoid inadvertently reproducing this violence in the process of property restitution and reconstruction.

Towards an interactional grammar of interjections: Expressing compassion in four Australian languages

ABSTRACT Words classified as ‘interjections’ tend to be treated in descriptive grammars as outside of morphosyntax, too contextually bound to warrant a systematic description of their syntagmatic relations. In this paper we argue that if one takes grammar to include recurrent patterns in conversational turns that are routinely connected with particular interactional functions, such as assessments and acknowledgements, then the grammar of interjections can indeed be incorporated into language description in ways that show the systematic relationships between form and function. We use a comparative corpus of conversations in four typologically distinct Australian Aboriginal languages (Garrwa, Gija, Jaru and Murrinhpatha) to illustrate how such an analysis may be developed. We focus on forms which have been described as ‘compassionate interjections’, which express that the speaker takes a compassionate affective stance towards something described in prior talk or evident in the situation. Despite differences in the morphological properties of these words in the languages we compare here, they display remarkable similarities in where they occur within conversational turns, and the functions they serve in different turn-related positions.

Estrangement and the Ethics of Attention in Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder

Drawing upon theoretical frameworks, such as Sara Ahmed’s “strange encounters” (2000), “willful subjects” (2014), and Judith Butler’s vulnerability (2004), the present article aims to explore female agency and action in The Wonder as fundamental steps to achieve transformation and change. For this purpose, I first offer a brief introduction to the vulnerability of the female body in Irish history, as it counts on a significant tradition firmly rooted in religious and class politics. Significantly, the novel foregrounds a reformulation of religious superstitions into new patterns of existence. Lib’s watchfulness and vigil astutely enact a self-displaying activity that offers the promise of a more communicative and empathic interaction with Anna. In addition, attention will be also paid to the narrative techniques that depict Lib’s failure to read Anna’s body fully as a wounded individual, thus revealing an encounter with alterity that can only work when there is will, love and affection. The story, then, challenges an aesthetics of grief and guilt and enacts, in turn, a new pattern of existence for both Anna and Lib. Such a pattern demands an ethics of attention and communication aimed to restore the self and display a more affective stance, which is necessary in order to encounter the limits of intelligibility and find out the perverse truth behind Anna’s “wonderful anomaly” (Donoghue 2016: 97).

The Pragmatic Functions of (Now) in Informal Arabic in Saudi Arabia

The present study aims to investigate the pragmatic meaning and functions of halhen (now) as a discourse marker in informal Arabic. To do so, the researcher implemented Aijmer’s (2002) classification of the discourse functions of now. The results show that halhen has textual and affective functions. Regarding its textual functions, halhen could be a topic changer for telling new information or returning to an earlier point; a frame between discourse units; a turn-taking signal; an item separating sub-topics; a marker of a new step in an argument; a marker of a new action in a cumulative series of actions; or an indicator of background information in the form of elaboration, explanation, clarification, or support. The findings also indicate that halhen, in its affective functions, works as a marker of affective stance for evaluation, an expression introducing the speaker’s opinion in contrast to others, a shift in the perspective, or as a hearer-oriented intensifier.

Stance constructions in CEO statements of CSR reports of Chinese and US companies

CEO statements from CSR (corporate social responsibility) reports serve as an important channel to promote the positive image of a company. It is critical for CEOs to take a positive stance to address the company's strategy to stakeholders. This paper examines grammatical stance constructions that US and Chinese Global Fortune 500 companies employed for establishing a responsible image in CEO statements. Based on 50 US and 50 Chinese CEO statements, the present paper investigates how CEOs use attitudinal, epistemic, and modality stance constructions to introduce their strategies for social responsibility. The findings of the study show that US CEO statements use significantly more attitudinal and epistemic stance constructions than Chinese CEO statements, indicating an affective stance taken by US CEOs. In addition, Chinese CEOs employ stance strategies focusing more on the companies' competence of environmental protection and self-improvement that conforms to the government policy. By contrast, US CEOs tend to actively present CSR participation in a wider range of social benevolence activities. The present study thus contributes to the increasing scholarly attention to CSR as well as to the understanding of different institutional practice across cultures. The study also provides implications for teaching and learning business writing and communication.

How to feminist affect: Feminist comedy and post-truth politics

Under the shifting epistemic and political norms of post-truth politics, the conditions of feminist solidarity and agency are increasingly threatened. This article argues that feminist humour provides models for affective orientations that sustain feminist work and survival during such periods of political crisis. First, I explore a potential issue post-truth politics poses for feminists: That information overload can lead to truth burn-out that threatens intersectional feminist thinking and action. Next, I explain why comedy is well-suited to help maintain feminist work in the context of post-truth politics. I then present a reading of Sarah Cooper’s skit, ‘How to medical’ to explore Cooper’s work and demonstrate how it operates as parodic political critique. I conclude that the affective stance of a feminist comedian models how feminists can keep surviving in the midst of post-truth crises. Such work shows how oppressive power can be engaged closely enough that deep critiques can be developed but with sufficient affective distance that feminist engagement can be sustained over time, through a multiplicity of crises. Cooper’s engagement can thus be read to generate strategies for how to (effectively) feminist affect under post-truth conditions.

Moving books and sensitive readers

Fiction is understood to have unique qualities that emotionally engage the reader, making it suitable as a didactic tool in medical education to help students prepare for the emotional aspects of their future profession. To date, however, little is known about the processes through which talking about fiction, film or poetry can help medical students to co-construct emotional reactions as affective stances and how that might contribute to their professional development. Using a discursive psychology approach, video recordings from 36 fiction seminars collected from 2016 to 2018 were analysed regarding how affective stances related to reading were constructed by medical students. The findings illustrate how students use subject–object relations to account for affective stances, meaning that they attribute their emotional reaction either to an aspect of the book (object-side explanations), or to personal characteristics (subject-side explanations). The way students enact and account for their affective stances can provide opportunities for tutors to create teachable moments for the students. This study contributes to discursive psychology and reader-response research, as well as medical education research.