Concept Of Stance Research Articles

Typology of Healthcare Interpreter Positionings as applied to family medicine

Interpreters facilitate cross-cultural communication, particularly in health care systems where treatment is provided to patients who do not speak the institution language. The effectiveness of the process depends, among other things, on the ability of the interpreter and the clinician to collaborate, which the Typology of Healthcare Interpreter Positionings is intended to facilitate. Objectives: The primary purpose of this study was to assess the potential applicability of the Typology, previously tested in mental health settings, to a family medicine setting. The secondary objective was to verify the complementarity of the concept of interpreter stance. Method: A deductive thematic analysis and co-occurrence analyses were conducted following focus groups with 89 experienced and trainee family physicians. Results: The potential of the Typology for family physicians was confirmed. Although the concept of stance was found to be complementary, it could not be integrated directly into the Typology. Conclusions: The Typology is applicable in both family medicine and mental health settings. The Typology provides conceptual guidance that the clinician and interpreter can use with confidence to deepen their collaboration.

Max Weber and Charles Taylor: On normative aspects of a theory of human action

This paper seeks to make two distinctive sets of contributions through a supplementary reinterpretation of Max Weber in the light of Charles Taylor’s expressivist-hermeneutical theory of human agency. First, it offers a reinterpretation of Weber’s work. Focussing on the concept of stance, the paper highlights that Weber’s theorising on values and their relation to cognition, action and identity is less underpinned by subjectivism, representationalism, emotivism and decisionism than is typically thought. Instead, Weber sets values within a non-naturalist dimension where agents find their bearings and are constituted as such. In this dimension, orientation to meaning takes place; identity, action and thought are constituted; and normative experiences (such as freedom, or responsibility) are made possible. Weber recognised that this non-naturalist dimension has variegated modes, but seemingly studied them in their purest and most logical form (the ‘ideal type’), hence his focus on explicit belief systems and world-images. Second, there is a prospective supplementation of Weber’s theory through Taylor’s notion of expression. For Taylor, we take a stance and orient ourselves expressively through the domain of strongly valued meanings. The notions of strong evaluation and articulation prove central to understanding embodied, symbolic and representational meaning-orientation in the non-naturalist dimensions of values. This supplementary reading places Weber as a central figure in current American, British and French debates about, respectively, the normative nature of human agency; the question of culture, meaning and their different forms and modes of operation; and the question of how to examine identity-formation.

‘I am sorry, but I have to speak Korean’: stancetaking through apology in public speech at an ‘English only’ Korean university

ABSTRACT This paper explores the ways in which apology functions as a stance act at public speech events. Rather than focusing on speakers’ intentions, in this study I pay attention to indexical meanings associated with apologies in a specific context. The study primarily analyses apology sequences that involve code-switching, which were drawn from ethnographic data gathered in a Korean university where English has been adopted as its official language (EOL). Data analysis shows that the use of apology allows speakers to take a stance towards their language choice and the institutional language policy. Both apology and speakers’ metalinguistic articulations prior to code-switching reflect and reinforce the two language ideologies: (1) the language policy is intended to serve for international members of the university, and (2), Korean can be used when needed. A closer look at the way in which apology is used in specific contexts suggests that speakers’ main purpose of apology is self-presentation in a public event. Apology functions to index speaker’s defiance of an institution’s language policy while avoiding their responsibility for the action. The sociolinguistic concept of stance allows us to better understand speakers’ positioning with respect to norms and expectations informed by institutional language policy.

언어의 심층과 ‘발화의 기본 관점’에 대한 연구

언어의 심층과 ‘발화의 기본 관점’에 대한 연구

Overcoming Uncertainty: Agency, Stance, and the Rise of Collective Action in Times of Crisis

ABSTRACTThis article examines how grassroots actors initiate and engage in collective action to transcend dramatic situations of large-scale societal crisis. Merging strands of sociolinguistic scholarship with social movement theory, the concepts of stance and stance-taking are presented to reveal how individuals collectively exert their agency during episodes of macrostructural instability and uncertainty. Stance is defined as the agentive and solidaristic position taken up by a group of actors to navigate and overcome moments of social rupture. Stance-taking is the situational ensemble of discursive, organizational, and dramaturgical practice through which stances are developed and deployed. Analysis of the social construction of stance promotes multidimensional understandings of how social movements intensify and expand under conditions of crisis. To illustrate the analytical purchase of these concepts, the study describes the stance-taking practices that fueled the rise of mass public protests in Buenos Aires, Argentina, at the height of a national crisis in 2001.

Temporality, stance ownership, and the constitution of subjectivity

This article examines the constitution of subjectivity through the analytic lens of John Du Bois' notion of stance. Understanding subjectivity requires taking into account longer timescales in order to better capture 1) the embeddings of stances and 2) the play of stances one with another across time. Attending to these longer timescales points to a further trouble with Du Bois' conception of stance and its relationship to subjectivity – what Du Bois calls stance ownership. Based on a consideration of an example in which a participant's stance is transformed across time, I propose three means of characterizing stance ownership: intersubjective recognition, embodied indexical icons, and the stance of things.

Stance and politeness in spoken Latvian

Abstract The present article is concerned with the concept of stance and its relationship to face, face work and politeness applied to Latvian spoken discourse. It offers an extensive review of relevant literature on stance and politeness theories, followed by an illustrative analysis of politeness strategies and stance markers found in a radio interview. On this basis, the article argues that stance markers - epistemic, evidential, mirative and hedging devices - may be considered a negative politeness strategy, responding to the speaker’s and hearer’s desire for autonomy. In conclusion, it suggests a hypothesis that could explain differing use of stance markers and politeness strategies by speakers fulfilling varying conversational roles and of various social standing.

Stancetaking strategies in judicial discourse: Evidence from US Supreme Court opinions

Intended as a study of stancetaking patterns in judicial opinions, this article aims at contributing to stance-related investigations of specialist discourse. For this purpose, it builds on the work of stance researchers and interactional linguists as well as attempts to apply their concepts in an examination of written data. In particular, the analysis is informed by Du Bois’s interactional concept of stance and the two related notions of epistemicity and evidentiality . It also follows Chilton’s discourse space theory in what is proposed as a stance analysis framework intended to aid researchers in categorising individual stance acts. The study draws on data from a theme-focused corpus of US Supreme Court opinions dealing with capital punishment.

Interactive patterns of the opening statement in criminal trials: A historical perspective

This study examines the discursive history and interactive aspects of the opening statement in Anglo-American courts. Informed by the concepts of stance and engagement, the study explicates the process of conceptual interaction which turns the jurors into co-constructors of the discourse, thereby making the opening statement fictively dialogic. Drawing upon 51 opening statements as recorded in Proceedings of the Old Bailey, between 1759 and 1789, the qualitative and quantitative analysis reveals that interactive devices are an integral part of the genre, and that pronouns appear to occur most frequently, followed by the lawyers’ use of attitude markers, questions, and reported discourse, respectively. With these devices, the lawyers are likely to be able to prime the jury into viewing the events and participants in a given direction.