Attitudinal Stance Research Articles

Toward trans multilingualisms: student attitudes toward and experiences with trans linguacultures in French

ABSTRACT There is increasing recognition of the imperative of gender justice in language education. Despite this momentum, reflected as it is in ongoing calls to resist cisheteronormativity and in a growing body of literature on the benefits of gender-just pedagogies, movement toward a distinctly trans approach to applied linguistics and toward trans multilingualisms remains woefully uneven and often entirely absent. One of many contributing factors is anecdotal speculation about student resistance that has persisted unchecked, particularly given limited data on student experiences with developing trans-inflected multilingualisms. To respond, this study explored the attitudinal stances taken by 59 undergraduates in a fifth-semester French course in the United States toward trans people, knowledges, and linguistic practices using a pre-course/post-course mixed-methods survey design. Results indicated that most students had no prior experience with trans linguacultures in their French-language coursework, contrasting with broad interest and readiness to learn about these topics. Although students varied in their attitudinal stances, results also demonstrated that an overall openness to, interest in, and valuing of developing their own trans multilingualisms was only enhanced by the 16-week course experience, adding to the robust body of evidence urging scholar-educators to work toward increasingly gender-just forms of language education.

Attitudinal Stance towards COVID-19 Pandemic: An appraisal analysis of the Jakarta Post editorials

This study examines the attitudinal stance of The Jakarta Post editorials about COVID-19 by applying Martin and White's appraisal system. The analysis of fifty editorial texts indicated that 70 % of negative assessments towards the government exceeded the positive ones. The illustrative judgment realisations for negative assessments are depicted by condemning government behaviour due to the government's failure in public communication, inconsistency in social distancing regulation, prioritisation of the economy over health, and mismanagement of social aid. The study suggests that the Indonesian government may learn from the negative judgments and cope with the uncertainties for projecting future COVID-19 risks.

A Corpus-based Study on Shell Nouns in “N + that” Construction in Popular Science Discourse: Rachel Carson’s Works as Example

By adopting the corpus-based approach, the present study compares the frequency of use, semantic distribution, and stance expression of shell nouns in the “N + that” clause in popular science discourse compared with academic writing. The results show that, firstly, the frequency of use of shell nouns in the “N + that” clause in popular science is lower than that in academic discourse. Secondly, the semantic coverage of shell nouns in popular science discourse is smaller than that in academic discourse, but its semantic proportion distribution is roughly the same, mainly including mental and linguistic shell nouns. Thirdly, in popular science discourse and academic discourse, the proportion of shell nouns with epistemic stances occupies an absolute advantage, while the proportion of shell nouns with attitudinal stances is less. The proportion of shell nouns expressing attitudinal stance in popular science discourse is greater than that in academic discourse.

Asserting Authorial Identity through Stance and Voice: Expert vs. Novice Scientific Writers

Successful scientific writers make use of various lexico-grammatical features to assert their authorial voice in ways that their target audience finds most convincing. While many studies have focused on the use of stance markers in scientific writing, very few have reported on the voice construction of Malaysian scientific writers. To address this, this paper reports a three-way comparative study of stance-taking made by Malaysian scientific writers, their international counterparts as well as novice writers. Analyses were conducted on a 1.2-million-word corpus of 212 published research articles written by local and international writers and 14 unpublished papers by local writers. Using Hyland’s (2005b) taxonomy of authorial stance markers, we found that both Malaysian experts and their international counterparts displayed similar patterns, albeit different approaches to stance-taking. In particular, Malaysian experts were found to prefer boosters the most when establishing their niche, while their international counterparts chose to use first-person plural pronouns and hedges for positioning their results. Novice writers, on the other hand, consistently showed a lack of strategies but tended to take an attitudinal stance in the discussion and conclusion segments. The differences found in novice and expert writers as well as between Malaysian writers and their international counterparts, point towards the complexity of stance-taking and stance-marking in research writing. This study shows that linguistics devices for marking attitudinal commitments towards propositions possibly mark individual aspects of voice and contribute to a broader conception of a writer’s self-representation within a text.

Against Renaissance Perspective: The Soaring Gaze

This essay explores whether ontology is internal to traditional Chinese culture from the perspective of the view from above. Ancient Chinese philosophy, poetry, and art abound with all kinds of descriptions of viewing from above. Such views from on high, as illustrated by famous works discussed in this essay, usually admit of no fixed focus; that is, there is no ontic being, concealed or disclosed, controlling the perceiving eyes. The gaze from above, which is either fluid or decentered, in some cases does not even focus on any real object. It merely reveals an abstract historical review or an attitudinal stance. As such, the fushi gaze, devoid of any concrete object of perception or any central point of reference, always points to the absence of ontology.

Attitudinal stance toward translanguaging in Saudi Arabia: A mixed method case study

AbstractWith the global demand to engage in a reflexive critique of using English‐only as a medium of instruction, teachers of English in higher education need to find ways to support and scaffold students in the process of learning, and translanguaging (TL), as defined by García and Lin, could be a useful tool for this purpose. Teaching English in Saudi higher education is a worthwhile context to investigate the pervasive practices of TL due to the immense variety of Englishes spoken, varying Arabic dialects spoken in the classes, and the fact that English students are seen as emerging bilingual/cultural students. This study aims to unpack teachers’ attitudes toward TL in Saudi Arabia as well as the ideological underpinnings of those attitudes in order to gauge the openness of teachers to this potentially useful practice. We sought to understand how TL is used as a practice and theory that empowers English language students while tapping into their available resources in the process of learning. Data were collected through a survey and then followed by semi‐structured interviews of five university English language professors. Findings of the current study, especially the interviews, suggested that teachers of English in the Saudi context realize that incorporating more than one cultural, dialectal, and linguistic code in the classroom is a natural, humanistic phenomenon. Results also showed that participants in the present study were ambivalent about its use for ideological, institutional, and pedagogical reasons. The study concludes that TL is viewed favorably by English as a foreign language teachers when both teachers and students share common linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The study implies that teachers and stakeholders can embrace a rhetoric of differences in their classrooms rather than a unitary, one‐sided way of meaning‐making.

Ukraine’s Voice Makes Russia Angry; Lithuania Speaks Boldly... Constructing attitudinal stance through personification of countries

AbstractPersonification, one of major types of metaphors often employed to express an attitude, is also an argumentative tool, especially in media texts on politically contested events. The present investigation aims at disclosing the attitudinal stance in personifying Ukraine, Russia, the Western countries and Lithuania in a corpus of texts collected from Lithuanian media in 2015–2018. The study relies on the three-step Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA, Charteris-Black 2004), involving three levels: linguistic, cognitive and rhetorical. More specifically, they include (1) identifying personification cases, (2) interpreting personification through cognitive metaphorical scenarios (Musolff 2016), and (3) explaining ideological implications encoded in the scenarios. The findings indicate that in the scenario of COMMUNICATION, Ukraine is mostly presented positively: active defender and in need of support, with occasional scepticism whether it is capable to change. The West, Lithuania including, is presented as a supporter, whereas Russia is viewed as a negatively evaluated antagonist.

Move Analysis of Thesis and Dissertation Abstracts in One Philippine Graduate Institute

In the Philippines, move-analytic investigations have been carried out. However, none of these have attempted to look into the genre of thesis and dissertation abstracts. Cognizant of this gap, this study examined a corpus of 100 research abstracts written by Filipino graduate students in one private university in Western Metro Manila. In order to identify the moves, rhetorical organization, linguistic features, and deviations in the corpus, mixed-method research design was employed. Analyses of data reveal that all the moves in Hyland’s model are present in the corpus. Such moves are linguistically realized through the use of present tense, present perfect tense, attitudinal stance words, deictic item+ inquiry type noun+ reporting verb formulaic pattern, past-passive constructions, opening subject+ reporting verb+ that-complement clause formulaic pattern, modals, and nominal phrases. As to rhetorical organization, non-linear organization is the most preferred, while linear organization is the least. With respect to deviations, word count, format, level of usage, syntactic structure, mechanics, grammar, and lexis are uncovered. Based on the results obtained, it is deduced that thesis and dissertation abstracts as corpus can provide meaningful insights as regards the exploration of moves vis-à-vis their linguistic realizations and sequences, academic writing, and Philippine English.

Distinguishing Nature of Science Beliefs, Knowledge and Understandings

Abstract Whilst teaching about the nature of science (NOS) is a significant goal of science education, there remains debate about specifying the NOS and appropriate pedagogies and approaches to researching the NOS. A neglected, but conceptually and practically significant, problem is the proliferation of NOS-related learning goals such as NOS beliefs, views, understandings and knowledge. In this theoretical paper, we argue that such goals are often poorly defined, and different goals cohere with different pedagogical and research strategies. We propose a novel three-part taxonomy of NOS learning goals (as NOS beliefs, knowledge and understandings) and contend that different approaches are appropriate for teaching and assessing NOS beliefs, views and knowledge. An NOS belief refers to a positive attitudinal stance towards some proposition that lacks justificatory support or cannot easily be judged true or false. NOS knowledge indicates justified true beliefs related to the NOS. NOS understanding denotes a grasping of how a collection of NOS knowledge is related. The goals vary by the extent to which they can be judged true or false and the degree of justification they require. For NOS beliefs, a range of stances is acceptable; NOS knowledge must be a true and justified belief; in the case of NOS understanding, teaching and assessment should focus on the appreciation of relationships between justified true beliefs. The novel taxonomy brings needed clarity to a confused aspect of NOS research and may lead to the development of NOS pedagogies and assessment tools more precisely targeted to well-defined learning goals.

Move Structures and Stance Adverbials in Editorials From The Bangkok Post and The New York Times

Apart from the fact that there are no fixed rules for writing newspaper editorials, there is no single study incorporating both analyses of moves and stance adverbials in online English newspaper editorials from The Bangkok Post in comparison to those from an international online English newspaper from another country. The aims of the present study include 1). exploring the move structure of editorials from The Bangkok Post and The New York Times, 2). finding stance adverbials in each move, and 3). identifying the positions of the stance adverbials found in each move. 60 editorials from 2017 to 2019 with the length of 550-700 words whose purpose is to call for action were selected from each newspaper archive. A list of stance adverbials and a proposed move structure were employed for identifying the moves and stance adverbials. ANTCONC was used as a tool for counting the frequencies (converted into percentages and normalized frequencies afterwards) and identifying the positions of stance adverbials. In both corpora, most of the editorials contain the sequence of Move 1-Move 2-Move 3-Move 4 (1234 or MS1). Furthermore, other outstanding move sequences include Move 1-Move 2- Move 3- Move 2-Move 3- Move 4 (123234 or MS2) and Move 1-Move 3- Move 2- Move 3- Move 4 (13234 or MS3). Epistemic stance adverbials were found two times more frequently than attitudinal stance adverbials and about seven times more frequently than style stance adverbials. The most prevalent sub-categories of epistemic stance adverbials are doubt/certainty, source of knowledge, and actuality, whereas the most outstanding attitudinal stance adverbials are importance and evaluation. Those showing importance were more frequently used in The Bangkok Post than those showing evaluation, but this is reversed in The New York Times. Whether these findings were influenced by the L1 of the writer, cultural differences, and institutional practices could be carried out in additional research.

A Comparative Study of Stance Adverbs Used in the Introduction Section of Chinese and English Native Scholars’ Journal Articles

The research aims to examine stance adverbs in the introduction section of Chinese and English native scholars’ journal articles. The corpus-based analysis reveals that Chinese and English native scholars use epistemic stance adverbs most frequently, attitudinal stance adverbs next, and style-of-speaking adverbs last, and that Chinese scholars use lower frequency and variety of stance adverbs than their native counterparts. It is also found that the frequency of the collocates mainly used by Chinese scholars is dramatically higher than that of English native scholars. It also indicates that Chinese scholars can reasonably use attitudinal stance adverbs frequently used by English native scholars, but their awareness of using attitudinal adverbs still needs to be improved. English native scholars are more inclined to put stance adverbs in the sentence-medial. Furthermore, both Chinese and English native scholars tend to use epistemic and style-of-speaking stance adverbs in the sentence-medial position, and they are more likely to place attitudinal stance adverbs in the sentence-initial and medial position.

“Thank you for reaching out:” Brand relationship management and the conversational human voice of customer care in online service encounters

Motivated by increased calls for research on language use in service encounters, this study examines how customer care agents working in the retail banking sector linguistically operationalize a conversational human voice in their online service encounters to support brand-customer relationships on social media. Applying a rhetorical move analysis framework to an extensive corpus of customer care agents’ responses to customers’ queries, comments, and complaints on Facebook, this study describes the discourse structure of these responses to identify the conventionalized moves performing the relational work in these brief online encounters. By examining the linguistic features that characterize these moves, my findings confirm that the linguistic elements supporting message personalization, positive politeness strategies, and invitational rhetoric collectively create the recognizable conversational voice that supports agents’ efforts to initiate and manage brand-customer relationships online. My findings also highlight the role of digital punctuation and emoji usage to support positive politeness strategies and to communicate agents’ attitudinal stance in their efforts to deliver service with a smile in an online environment. Finally, this study calls attention to and provides insights into language usage, online social interaction, and webcare discourse within one facet of the banking services industry.

Death on the Page, Rebirth on the Screen: Literature Between Translation and Adaptation, Ghassan Kanafani's Men in the Sun as a Case Study

This research provides a comparative study between Hilary Kilpatrick's English translation and Tawfiq Saleh's film adaptation ʾ Al-Makhduʿun ( The Duped) of Ghassan Kanafani's Men in the Sun. Drawing on Narrative and Appraisal theories, this research investigates the ideological disparity between Kilpatrick and Saleh's approaches to Kanafani's text by examining their respective attitudinal stance and patterns of narrative (re)framing in relation to three dimensions: politics, religion, and culture. The research, thus, accentuates the ways in which the translator's identity, with its nexus of associated values, can reshape and reconfigure both narratives and reality by producing hegemonic or resistant translations. In doing so, the study, from a postcolonial perspective, aims to redirect the attention toward the ‘vertical’ power dynamics in and of translation, in addition to exposing the varying, often subtle, levels of negotiation, manipulation and intervention such politically loaded narratives, especially contested narratives, experience in translation. In fact, combining literary translation with adaptation reveals how narratives of the same objet d'art are creatively interpreted and re-negotiated differently when the translation medium involves visuals.

Stance Taking in English and Chinese News Headlines

This study conducts a small corpus-assisted investigation on the linguistic epistemic markers and attitudinal stance markers of English and Chinese news headlines and discusses the possible similarities and differences. Results show that in the Chinese news headlines, certainty stance markers and evidentiality markers are more frequent, whereas in the English news headlines, hedging stance markers and evaluation stance markers are more common. These differences may be due to the differences in English and Chinese news value and news writing modes.

ATTITUDE REALIZATION IN NEWS REPORTS: AN INTERPRETATION THROUGH AN APPRAISAL ANALYSIS

For the maintenance of the authorial voice, newspapers use rhetorical markers as an external supporting voice to win their readership. The current five year studies show that news writers maintain engagement with their readers by their stances towards their point of views. This study aimed to find the attitudinal stances of two Pakistani Online newspapers i.e. 'Dawn' (alternative newspaper) and 'The News' (mainstream newspaper). The newspaper's inclination was identified through its language. To discover the newspapers' stances, Martin and White (2005) 'Appraisal Analysis' framework was employed on '2' news reports comprising of '5013' words on Prime Minister Imran Khan's Speech at 74th United Nations' session along with Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) by Norman Fairclough (1995). It was found that both newspapers indirectly invoked attitudes by laying evaluative ground which was explicitly explained in the quoted text. The prime minister of Pakistan Imran Khan was found the 'Appraiser' in both news reports and served as a main social actor in highlighting Pakistan's current issues. The issues expected to be solved urgently for peace and prosperity in the region by the involvement of world leaders and United Nations on Kashmir conflict between Pakistan and India, climate change and elimination of Islam phobia.

Qualitative Adjectives in EFL Students’ Reflective Writing Essays

Qualitative adjectives are often used in expressive writing, including reflective writing. They express and (de)intensify feelings and emotions, thereby expressing stance. This study investigates the adjective profiles of 60 first-year EFL students’ reflective essays and compares male and female university students’ utilization of qualitative adjectives and those used as attitudinal stance markers. Data were collected from a reflective writing task after students participated in a seminar on effective listening. Analyses were conducted considering the General Service List (GSL), the Academic Word List (AWL), and words that do not appear in either of the preceding lists. The results indicated that qualitative adjectives accounted for 6% of the words in these reflective writing essays, and the male students used a greater number of adjectives than the female students. This difference, which was at a statistically significant level, likely stems from male students’ greater use of adjectives from the Academic Word Lists. The results also showed that 47.5% of the adjectives used in these essays were attitudinal. There was no statistically significant difference between the frequencies with which the male and the female students used these attitudinal adjectives. The results are discussed and recommendations are made to increase students’ effective use of adjectives in reflective writing.

“Commenting on your work is a waste of time only!”: An appraisal-based study of evaluative language in supervisory feedback

Research on supervisory feedback on master’s theses, especially attitudinal stances conveyed in such feedback, is thin on the ground. Students’ construal of their supervisors’ attitudes, however, can have a profound impact on their engagement with supervisory feedback. Drawing on the appraisal framework, which characterizes attitudinal meanings in terms of affect (i.e., emotional responses), judgement (i.e., normative evaluation of human behaviors) and appreciation (i.e., aesthetically-/socially-based evaluation of objects and products), this study examined Nepalese supervisors’ attitudinal stances communicated in written comments on master’s thesis drafts (n = 76) submitted by English-as-a-foreign-language students and oral feedback on proposal and thesis defences (n = 89). Quantitative analyses revealed that while instances of appreciation dominated in the supervisors’ use of evaluative language, judgements were also frequent, with affective responses trailing far behind. In both the oral feedback and written comments, significant disciplinary variations were observed for certain types of judgment and appreciation. These findings are discussed in terms of disciplinary culture and the potential impact of the attitudinal stances on students’ learning. Implications are derived for the productive framing of supervisory feedback to facilitate students’ feedback uptake.

An experimental study of the detection of clicks in English

Abstract This experimental study sets out to determine whether people detect click sounds in American English. Recent research has documented the use of non-phonemic clicks in a variety of languages to fulfill a range of functions such as sequence management or signaling searches and different types of attitudinal stance. While these clicks are acoustically salient and have been reported to occur with a frequency of up to 14 per minute in British English, they have not been widely investigated until relatively recently. For this experiment, we designed video stimuli consisting of A and B pairs of approximately 10 seconds of speech, one with a click and the other with the click edited out. We gave 118 participants a questionnaire and asked if they could detect a difference between the pairs of videos. The results indicate that the majority of participants, between 79% and 86%, do not detect click sounds.

Exploring and Explaining Non-Compliance with Community Supervision

Abstract Despite a developed theoretical and empirical body of research into the dynamics of compliance with community supervision, the phenomenon of non-compliance has received surprisingly less attention. This article explores the perspectives and experiences of 93 people in Scotland who were breached or recalled for non-compliance with the community sentences or post-release licences they were subject to. Drawing on this analysis, we advance an integrated, theoretically explanatory and empirically informed model demonstrating the contributions of, and interplay between, three key elements we identified as shaping non-compliance: motivational postures and attitudinal stances and their underlying mechanisms; various systemic, structural and social influences that bind the exercise of agency and shape situations of actions; and the impacts and effects of people’s interactions with authorities.

The As If-Construction: A Grammaticalization Perspective

This paper aims to address language change of the complex conjunction as if from lexicalization, grammaticalization, pragmatics, and corpus study. The combined complex conjunction as if does not show the semantic bleach and decategorization in the developmental path from the adjunct clause to the complement clause. The as if in the monoclause and bare complement clause develop to the discourse marker and speech act, carrying derision, counterexpectation, and denial. In this process epistemic and negative attitudinal stances are recognized. Insubordination, accompanied with phonological erosion, reanalysis and pragmatic inference, plays in the grammaticalization of the as if-construction. The corpus-based study shows that hypotheticals are dominant but the present indicatives are little by little on the rise, even though their collocational frequencies are still comparatively very low.