Stance Marker Research Articles

‘Do not parade your ignorance’: Negation as a power tool of toxic geek masculinity

Catering to a primarily male user population, Reddit is often said to be a breeding ground for toxic language use, which has led to the development of multiple computational classification models for the automated identification of toxicity in online conversations. Since negation can play a key role in cyberbullying, functioning as a popular stance marker in the dialogical exchange of dominating views in the digital sphere, it should not be ignored. Likewise, its use as a rhetorical strategy deserves more linguistic attention. Described as Engagement resources of disclaim in Appraisal theory, negated constructions may be employed by Reddit users to disalign themselves from divergent perspectives through emotion-driven ad hominem attacks, not only resulting in a potentially detrimental impact on the users’ mental health, but also perpetuating toxic power relationships. Therefore, this paper examines the use of negation, in combination with various other interpersonal resources, within the Redditors’ dialogical interactions, to explore its possible motivations and role in shaping the online discourse. A computer-assisted appraisal analysis was conducted on 2637 most upvoted comments and replies (49,866 words), extracted from the subreddit of r/AustralianPolitics between 11–14 April and 7–10 May 2022, during the period leading up to the so-called federal climate change election in Australia. The study shows evidence of a seemingly dominant negation pattern characterised by negative judgement and its findings tentatively suggest that some of the male Australian users may use negation as a discursive strategy driven by ideology and emotion. This raises the possibility that the language use encountered on r/AustralianPolitics may be influenced by covert toxic geek masculinity.

Final tteyuu as a mockery stance marker: Multifunctionality and ongoing semantic change in Japanese social media

This paper explores the ongoing semantic change of a discourse marker in Japanese social media. An analysis of 140 instances of the sentence-final tteyuu on Twitter, renamed X in July 2023, suggests that this discourse marker is shifting from a textual function of elaboration to a stance marker of lighthearted mockery. I argue this transition is attributed to its recurrent use in specific contexts, leading to invited inferences about the writer's intentions in expanding upon an idea, which extend beyond purely informational to interpersonal and social concerns. The functional ambiguity of these examples suggests an intermediate stage in tteyuu's evolution. The findings of this study underscore the centrality of pragmatic inferencing in semantic changes as well as the context-dependent nature of meaning creation.

‘Jackpot!’: How social forces intertwine with language-internal mechanisms to turn Korean noun taypak into an interactive

This study investigates how social forces and language-internal mechanisms interact to give rise to stance markers that reflect the speaker’s subjective and intersubjective stance. Using data from the NIKL (Motwuuy) Spoken Corpus and Daily Conversation Corpus and the Sejong Spoken Corpus, we examine how the Korean noun taypak (‘large gourd’) has become culturally associated with good fortune. With the meteoric rise of South Korea as an economic miracle in recent years, the country is also witnessing great economic disparity and more people are tempted to try moving up the socio-economic ladder through taypak, that is, ‘hitting the jackpot’. In this ‘try to get rich quick’ climate, the use of taypak in the sense of ‘hitting the jackpot’ rose in frequency, and its evaluative use (e.g., ‘awesome’) has further developed into an interjection (equivalent to English ‘wow!’). Using a discourse grammar framework, we discuss how language-internal mechanisms such as metonymic extension, conversion, cooptation and (inter)subjectification intertwine with socio-cultural forces to give rise to a near-ubiquitous stance marker that reflects a new cultural trend. The findings of this study contribute to our better understanding of how social factors can influence the development and uses of a common word that we otherwise would hardly notice.

The utterance-finaltari siteconstruction in interaction: a general extender as a play stance marker

AbstractRegarding the Japanese utterance-final constructiontari siteas a general extender, this paper discusses the innovative function of this formulaic expression, the non-final form oftari suru‘and/or do’, to mark play stance. I argue that the sequential and interactional context where it is used provides the grounds for this construction to function as such, which contributes to building a play frame intersubjectively. General extenders such as Englishor somethingare highly pragmatic because, by offering a prototypical exemplar that precedes, the speaker invites the listener to infer the implied vague category. My analysis oftari sitein naturally occurring Japanese conversations adds to the existing claim that English fixed expressions are employed to express stances in everyday conversation. Moreover, I found that the play stance markertari siteexpresses the speaker’s positive self-presentation, in contrast to one of the previously claimed general extenders’ functions to convey hedges.

Shared Knowledge as an Account for Disaffiliative Moves: Hebrew ki ‘Because’-Clauses Accompanied by the Palm-Up Open-Hand Gesture

ABSTRACT Exploring the grammar–body interface, the present study examines employment of Hebrew causal clauses prefaced by the conjunction ki “because” in responsive disaffiliative moves. We show that in such environments, ki-clauses tend to convey information that appeals to the participants’ shared knowledge and to be accompanied by the Palm Up Open Hand gesture (PUOH). We argue that the PUOH in such contexts constitutes an embodied epistemic stance marker functioning to present the account prefaced by ki as based on shared knowledge, in pursuit of intersubjectivity and a shared perspective. The reference to shared epistemic access implies an interpretation of the disaffiliative move as reasonable under the circumstances provided by the account, inviting co-participants to display affiliation. The study thus validates that causality is a socially constructed, complex configuration that may include the speaker’s epistemic stance toward the actions accomplished in an interaction and suggests an interactional source for their interrelatedness. Data are in Hebrew

Inclusive third-turn repeats: managing or constraining students’ epistemic status?

ABSTRACT This study examines classroom teachers’ third-turn repeats marked with the Japanese epistemic stance marker ‘ne.’ The author conducted multimodal conversation analysis on video recordings of English-language classrooms in Japanese secondary schools. The analysis focused on the teachers’ gaze direction during their third-turn repeat, which was marked with the epistemic stance marker. ‘Ne’ marks the sharedness of the repeated item between the speaker and the hearer. By treating the repeated item as shared with the recipient and changing the recipient from the student who answered to the other students who did not answer, the teachers treat the repeated item as also having been available to those who did not answer. Teachers are thus including non-respondent students in the knowing party. The author terms such practice as ‘inclusive third-turn repeat’, which teachers canonically deploy as an inclusive practice in classroom interaction. Depicting how this practice establishes a common knowledge status of the students, the study highlights classroom teachers’ pieces of work towards the goal of co-production of knowledge.

“It can do me1 (‘what’)?” — On the development of a Cantonese interrogative pronoun into a negative stance marker

Based on data obtained from Cantonese corpora and interactions in everyday contexts, this paper identifies and analyzes the range of pragmatic functions that the interrogative pronoun me1 has. Focusing on the subjective evaluative functions of me1 that go beyond interrogation, this present study attempts to suggest the development pathway of me1 becoming a negative stance marker. Derived from combining the interrogative pronoun mat1 ‘what’ and the general noun je5 ‘thing’ followed by phonological reduction, it is observed that me1 (<mat1je5) has gone a long way, from replacing an item of enquiry, to substituting for an unretrievable or unutterable item to avoid taboo and embarrassment, and further to a negative evaluative attitudinal marker that can occupy a range of syntactic positions (including the pre-nominal and clause-initial positions) to signal the speaker's disagreement and derogatory attitude, and finally to become an interrogative sentence-final particle which is essentially subjective and negatively biased. Adopting a broadly interactional linguistic perspective (Ochs et al., 1996; Selting and Couper-Kuhlen, 2001), our present study looks at how me1 can be used to negotiate interpersonal functions in the course of conversational interactions. Findings in this paper will have significant contributions to the study of wh-markers generally, and provide important insights into how extended functions of wh-markers can be developed in Sinitic languages specifically.

Disagreement, epistemic stance and contrastive marking in Catalan parliamentary debate

The aim of this paper is to offer a qualitative analysis of the relationship between disagreement, epistemic stance and contrast in parliamentary debate. To this end, all disagreeing moves including both an epistemic stance marker and a contrastive marker equivalent to but have been identified in a corpus of parliamentary debates in Catalan. The epistemic stance markers have been classified considering three main factors: type of marker (epistemic, evidential, attitudinal), epistemic scale (certainty-uncertainty) and position (either in the thesis or in the antithesis). The approach adopted encompasses interactional linguistics and pragmalinguistics as it considers how context variables, such as those related to genre, have an influence on the use and discourse effects of markers of epistemic stance and contrast. The main research questions are two: (i) how genre norms have an incidence on the expression of disagreement and the interpretation of epistemic stance markers, and (ii) how epistemicity and contrast interact with disagreement in parliamentary debate in order to reinforce the speakers' argumentation and block the opponent's opinion, as either questionable or shared knowledge. The analysis shows that disagreeing moves in the corpus establish a long-distance relation with a previous stretch of discourse and trigger a polyphonic strategy that can be expressed through a contrastive construction where epistemic markers qualify either the thesis or the antithesis. In both cases, the disagreeing argument (i.e. the antithesis) is thus reinforced not only when the epistemic stance marker expresses certainty but also when it expresses uncertainty.

From the incomplete to the complete: The emergence of a new paradigm of sentence-final particles in Korean

This paper analyzes a case of grammaticalization of a sentence-final particle (sfp) -tanun that developed from an adnominal complementizer (comp) structure ta hA-non in Middle Korean (mk). This newly emerging sfp carries a wide range of subjectified and intersubjectified, i.e., stance-marking, meanings such as boastful talk, fake-mirativity, pejoration, self-degradation, attention-seeking, and attracting sympathy. It is argued that this grammaticalization process was initially triggered by the constructional similarities between the mk comp sentences and the desiderative and doubt-marking indirect interrogative sentences. In the course of grammaticalization, this marker shows increasing collocational compatibility and expansion of its use as a stance marker in Present-Day Korean (pdk). Ellipsis of the head noun induces the addressee to reconstruct the missing noun that is compatible with the explicitly presented comp sequence with which the utterance is ended. As it frequently occurs sentence finally, -tanun becomes conventionalized as a sfp. Notably, the development of the declarative-based sfp -tanun triggered a parallel development involving the other sfps, i.e., imperative, interrogative, and hortative markers. Based on these observations, this paper argues that grammaticalization processes can be paradigm-based and can be triggered by analogy by virtue of structural similarity among the forms involved.

Divergence in uncertainty: the Korean non-committal suffix -(u)lkel

Abstract This study explores the Korean final suffix -(u)lkel in the context of stance-taking within the framework of stance triangle and the notion of emergent stance. Using data from one hundred 30-minute telephone calls and 15 video recorded conversations totaling 270 min, this study examines the non-committal epistemic function of -(u)lkel from a conversation analytic approach and demonstrates how speakers mobilize this suffix as a divergent alignment stance marker when confronted with a conflicting, yet unclear understanding of information associated with a stance object. Moreover, the high intonational boundary tone associated with -(u)lkel cedes the floor to the recipient where a negotiation of the conflicting information offers an opportunity for a readjustment of positions towards either a converging-diverging alignment or disalignment (i.e., speakers’ abandonment of a shared stance object). As such, this study shows that a grammatical suffix such as -(u)lkel is not simply deployed to mark propositional information but is also utilized as an interactional resource that enables dialogic speech activities such as co-construction of stance.

From interrogative to disaffiliative stance marker: An analysis of mwusun ‘what’ in Korean conversation

This study explores interactional uses of mwusun (‘what’, ‘what kind’) utterances in naturally occurring Korean conversation and how prosody and sequential location contribute to its interactional uses. Although interrogatively formatted, the mwusun utterances are frequently used to display the speaker's disaffiliative stance such as disagreement, complaint, or challenge. We show that by repeating the prior speaker's talk either partially or fully and by doing so with mwusun, a speaker displays the disaffiliative stance. In terms of the sequential contexts, while the information-seeking mwusun occurs in first position, the disaffiliative mwusun occurs in second position and serves to challenge what the other speaker has said in interaction. After the disaffiliative mwusun construction, sequences are expanded with disagreement, challenge, or defense from the speaker of first position. Prosodic and acoustic features such as prosodic junctures, boundary tones, or intensity provide further empirical evidence of mwusun in the disaffiliative contexts. For example, the mwusun as a challenge is produced with a prosodic juncture between mwusun and the preceding and/or subsequent elements, whereas the mwusun in questions is produced without any juncture. This study shows how speakers utilize multiple resources including grammatical and prosodic features to maximize mutual understanding in conversation.

Japanese Maa as a Meta-Interactional Stance Marker Displaying Orientation to Problematicity in Interaction

Japanese <i>Maa</i> as a Meta-Interactional Stance Marker Displaying Orientation to Problematicity in Interaction

Stance of Indonesian Writers in Journal Articles

Stance refers to attitude, feelings, judgment or commitment of a speaker towards a proposition. A speaker employs certain linguistics features to express his stance including hedges, boosters, self-mentions and attitude markers. This research aims at analyzing stance of Indonesian writers in social and hard science journal articles written in English by examining the use of linguistic features employed as stance markers. The research result shows that the writers of social science articles use more stance marker compares to those of hard science articles. Indonesian writers maintain the objectivity of academic writing as there was very limited use of self-mentions in the articles. The stance markers used by Indonesian writers represent the positive, negative or neutral type of stance.

Grammatical devices of stance in written academic English

Stance is a feature of academic writing that refers to how writers interact and engage with their readers by means of linguistic devices. This study focuses on the grammatical devices—and semantic distinctions thereof—that are employed by academic writers of English to express stance in research article abstracts in the areas of applied linguistics (AL) and literature (L). To this end, a corpus of 120 research article abstracts (60 in the area of AL and another 60 in that of L) was built and analysed using SPSS and following Biber et al.’s (1999) framework of grammatical devices of stance. The abstracts were extracted from high-quality journals in the respective areas: Applied Linguistics and English: Journal of the English Association. Both are ISI journals and published by Oxford Academic Publishing. A mixed-method approach, applying quantitative and qualitative measures, was adopted to answer the two questions: How is stance grammatically expressed in AL research article abstracts and L research article abstracts, and How is the expression of stance in AL research article abstracts similar to/different from that in L ones? The findings are construed in light of theories of academic discourse and English for Academic Purposes (EAP). The results reveal that there are important similarities and differences in the extent to which and the means through which stance is expressed in AL research article abstracts and L research article abstracts. In particular, the findings show that both AL and L abstracts were similar in the most frequently used stance marker which is the stance complement clause. However, they were different in the frequency of use of other devices. The study provides insights into the ways academic writers express stance in various fields which better our ability to write research article abstracts.

You are kidding right? The English present progressive as a stance marker in film dialogue

Telecinematic discourse is a highly involved and emotionally loaded register (Quaglio 2009; Forchini 2012) in which stance and emotionality are conveyed via a variety of linguistic structures, including intensifiers (Tagliamonte, Roberts 2005; Banos 2013), expletives (Azzaro 2018; Bednarek 2019), vocatives (Formentelli 2014; Zago 2015) and emotionally charged lexical bundles (Freddi 2011; Bednarek 2012). The current study focuses on the present progressive in English film dialogue as an additional stance marker, especially when used in non-aspectual functions. Following Leech et al. (2009)’s model, different uses of the present progressive are investigated in a corpus of filmic speech, the Pavia Corpus of Film Dialogue . After categorizing all the occurrences of present progressives in the corpus by their specific function (aspectual, futurate, stative, attitudinal), items are further classified based on their affiliative or disaffiliative stance. The focus is then narrowed down onto attitudinal, particularly interpretive, present progressives. The most common verbs used in interpretive patterns are singled out and analyzed in greater detail, by looking at the clusters or n- grams they appear in and drawing comparisons with spontaneous spoken language data. Findings show that interpretive present progressives are used extensively in film dialogue and often associate with a stance-marking, primarily disaffiliative function. The trend is especially evident in a set of verbs that appear in recurring patterns and n -grams throughout the corpus and act as privileged interpretive predicates. Data also suggest that multiple features cluster together to convey interpersonal meaning and display disalignment and conflict on screen.

How a Terminal Tag Can Display Epistemic Stance and Constrain Responses: The Case of Oder Nicht in German

ABSTRACT This conversation analytic study explores German turn-final oder nich(t), as in Soll ich jetzt weiterlesen oder nicht (“should I continue reading or not”). These oder nicht-appended questions raise one state of affairs and invoke its negated version via oder nicht. They emerge in environments in which epistemics and/or deontics are negotiated. Through these turns, participants index their commitment to the likelihood of the state of affairs expressed in the question. Oder nicht works as an epistemic stance marker and minimizes the potential for disconfirmation. As such, oder nicht is a resource for questioners to design their questions in ways that index their stance that an agreeing response is more likely. Thus, oder nicht effectively constrains the recipient’s options (similar to English polarized tag questions). Data are in German with English translations.

A Study of Interactional Functions of –kes kath- Using Corpus Analysis

This paper analyzes interactional functions and meaning of Korean sentence pre-final marker, -kes kath- in various contexts from micro and macro level perspectives. In order to accomplish the purpose, this study has used authentic and contemporary corpus. As a result from the data analysis, it can be found out that the marker -kes kath- functions in more precise interactional ways in actual contexts. Throughout the discourse data, this study will offer functions of -kes kath- as a stance marker, a mitigating device and elucidate in detail the subtle ways in which a speaker expresses his or her opposing stance in conversational interaction through -kes kath-. By using -kes kath-, the speaker mitigates an utterance, which in macro-level analysis contains contestable content. The study will also reveal how experts discursively establish their authority or strengthen their opinion by using -kes kath-. All in all the analysis shows that the speaker

Stancetaking in spoken ELF discourse in academic settings: interpersonal functions of I don’t know as a face-maintaining strategy

Our study examines interpersonal functions enacted through a stance marker in spoken ELF academic discourse. We specifically focus on investigating the functions of I don’t know in an academic speech event by embracing an interpersonal pragmatics and sociolinguistics perspective to figure out how it contributes to the act of stancetaking as an intersubjective activity. We have examined 14 interactions of doctoral defense discussions from the ELFA corpus. Our detailed discourse analysis of these doctoral defense discussions has revealed five distinctive interpersonal functions of the stance marker I don’t know allowing speakers to construct their stance and adopt a face-maintaining strategy in the ongoing spoken discourse: prefacing a suggestion, seeking acceptance, hedging/mitigating, checking agreement, and expressing uncertainty. Considering the highly-context dependent and context-regenerated functions of I don’t know, our study attempts to delve into the relational and interpersonal aspect of communication, and thus contributes to research in this strand by disclosing the interpersonal functions of stancetaking as an intersubjective activity with a particular focus on ELF academic discourse.

The Role of Connectives and Stance Markers in the Processing of Subjective Causal Relations

ABSTRACT Interpreting subjectivity in causal relations takes effort: Subjective, claim-argument relations are read slower than objective, cause-consequence relations. In an eye-tracking-while-reading experiment, we investigated whether connectives and stance markers can play a facilitative role. Sixty-five Chinese participants read sentences expressing a subjective causal relation, systematically varied in the use of stance markers (no, attitudinal, epistemic) in the first clause and connectives (neutral suoyi “so”, subjective kejian “so”) in the second clause. Results showed that processing subjectivity proceeds highly incrementally: The interplay of the subjectivity markers is visible as the sentence unfolds. Subjective connectives increased reading times, irrespective of the type of stance marker being used. Stance markers did, however, facilitate the processing of modal verbs in subjective relations. We conclude that processing subjectivity involves evaluating how the argument supports the claim and that connectives, modal verbs, and stance markers function as processing instructions that help readers achieve this evaluation.

영어 -ly 유형 인식견지부사의 담화표지 기능 이해도 분석: 한국인 EFL 학습자와 원어민 화자를 대상으로

English <italic>-ly</italic> adverbials (LY) with epistemic modality are frequently used as discourse markers (DM) in spoken language. In this paper, LY DM is defined as an epistemic stance marker. The experiment for this study aims to analyze Korean EFL learners