Search

This study argues that online discourse about female victims of sexual harassment contain stances and stereotypical assumptions that portray negative attitudes towards the victims. Using Martin and White's Appraisal Theory aided by Lazar's Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis, it analyses the attitudes and opinions of Nigerian online participants about the victims, and discusses the ideological perceptions about them in order to explicate the nature of discursivity and stance-taking in online discussions on sexual harassment cases in Nigerian Universities. The data comprise 500 readers' comments on online narrations about sexual harassment in five Nigerian universities downloaded from Nairaland.com. Findings reveal the use of negative affect and judgement expressed towards victims of sexual harassment present them as liars and willing accomplices in the harassment situation. Also, dimensions of ideological perceptions of females portray them as guilty victims whose behaviours and actions instigated the harassment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the second half of the 17th century the interest in crime news was enhanced by the appearance of the Old Bailey Trial Proceedings as a specialised periodical publication recounting trial narratives in a condensed form. Despite their formulaic character, the Old Bailey Proceedings provided middle- and upper-class readers with an insight into the dynamics of the courtroom and were therefore important vehicles for the dissemination of specialised knowledge. In my study I adopt a corpus-assisted discourse approach in order to identify collocational patterns around key words and investigate their role in the construction of meaning and ideology in discourse. Findings show that while most of the accounts encode the reporter's alignment with the jury's decision, some occasionally go offscript by problematising the logical coherence between evidence and verdict through a skilful packaging of the information which ultimately challenges the myth of an infallible justice system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how Hong Kong returnees negotiate and construct their transnational identities in their post-sojourn period via two indexical cues, stance taking, and self-labelling. Based on the narratives about remigration, this study investigates how returnees construct their identities discursively by taking stances to evaluate and align with sociocultural values and using self-labelling to index their transnational identities in their post-sojourn period. In doing so, this study hopes to contribute to the existing migration studies on Hong Kong returnees in terms of language and identity construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Security of life and property is a fundamental human right expected to be enjoyed by all citizens irrespective of gender, race, ethno-religious and political affiliation. This right is clearly enshrined in Section 14 (2) (b) of the 1999 constitution of the Federal republic of Nigeria but, as germane as this section of the constitution is and most importantly with the promise of tackling insecurity by President Muhammadu Buhari (PMB), there have become an overwhelming security challenges in all the regions in Nigeria. But, as crucial as these media explanations are, PMB has not granted many interviews, and hence not enough scholarly attention has been paid to them, much less to the stance and pragmatic acts he uses in his interviews. To fill this gap in literature, this paper investigates the practs employed by PMB in maintaining his stance on government's readiness to tackle insecurity in the country. Four overseas media interviews were purposively selected as primary data, transposed to writing, line-numbered in Word document and subjected to content analysis with insights from Mey's Pragmatic Act Theory and DuBois's Stance Triangle. The findings reveal that practs of denying, defending, claiming, and questioning characterise the stance acts used by PMB in maintaining government's position on insecurity and willingness to deliver its mandate of tackling the growing insecurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both news media and politicians, taking advantage of their cultural authority through spoken and written texts, contribute to forming public opinion, in particular with the use of discursive means, to shape the way people understand migration. Research has so far pointed to negative representations of the Other and argumentation against migrants and refugees revolves around the topoi of burden, illegality, insecurity, violence and threat, which are known to trigger emotions such as resentment, anger and fear. However, media coverage of refugees’ arrivals can also contribute to a positive construction of migrants’ identities: this is what has been called ‘counter-narrative’, i.e. a set of narratives aimed at changing the mainstream discourse, which is overwhelmingly negative. This study focuses on the thematic, lexical and syntactic choices in Greek Cypriot and French communist newspapers (Haravgi and L’Humanité respectively) and the choices used to construct an argumentation which fosters the inclusion of migrants. Focusing mainly on headlines, the study adopts critical discourse approaches (Wodak 2001, inter alia; van Dijk 2001, inter alia) and uses tools from corpus linguistics methodologies (Bednarek 2008; Baker et al. 2008; van Dijk 1995, inter alia) to extract and analyze salient lexical items. The results show similarities in the way stance is constructed, for instance an anti EU stance is common to both newspapers, however the Greek Cypriot newspaper appeals to Christian values to foster charity and empathy, and the French newspaper appeal to the legal rights of migrants and the French citizen’s duty to foster solidarity.

The present study aimed at investigating gender identity through the expression of interpersonal metadiscourse stance marking. The current study investigated male and female authors' pattern of stance markers utilization, focusing on totally 60 English and Persian articles, and English articles written by Persian speakers. Based on Xu and Longs'(2008) classification, five categories of stance markers (textual, epistemic, attitudinal, deontic and causation) were identified and the frequencies of their occurrences were computed. The differences in each group were investigated separately through running chi-square tests. Regarding English articles, it was found that both male and female writers used the same pattern of stance taking except the epistemic markers. Another finding of this study was that both male and female writers followed the same pattern of stance taking in Persian articles except the deontic ones. In English articles written by Persian speakers, female writers used the same pattern as their native counterparts, while male ones were affected mostly by their native language. Attending to stance taking patterns, this article provides an informative picture which illustrates the common preferences of disciplinary community especially between male and female writers. Hence, the implications of this study can be helpful in academic writing, in assessment, and textbooks.

[full article and abstract in English] The subject of the paper is the analysis of the expression of stance taking in an online environment, mainly in the comments of users of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter about the presidential candidates of the American Presidential Election in 2016. The empirical data analysis was carried out following the ideas of J. W. Du Bois (2007), D. Barton & C. Lee (2013) and R. Englebretson (2007) on stance taking and J. W. Du Bois’ (2007) model of stance triangle, i.e. grouping instances of stance-taking into one of these groups: evaluation, affect or epistemicity, which served as the main framework of this study. The work of linguists D. Barton & C. Lee (2013) on the expression of stance-taking in an online environment were also taken into consideration. Having in mind the fact that stance identification is a challenging task , i.e. it could be implicitly as well as explicitly expressed and that it should be inferred from different modes of its expression and interpreted with reference to many contextual and intertextual factors, in the current analysis the authors focused on interpretation of linguistic as well as other multimodal means of the expression of stance that were used by users of social networks in their writing spaces on the topic of the Presidential Election in the United States in 2016. It should also be mentioned that the analysis presented in this article offers only one of the many possible interpretations of the data. Moreover, the current paper concentrates mainly on the presentation of the empirical data of the expression of affective stance. However, it should be indicated that in some cases stance types overlap, i.e. one instance could be treated as both taking an affective and an evaluative stance, as judgements and evaluation (i.e. evaluative stance) are often based on feelings (i.e. affective stance). The main source of the empirical data were the instances of stance taking taken from comments found on Donald Trump’s and Hillary Clinton’s verified Facebook and Twitter pages during their presidential campaigns in 2016. All in all, 147 examples of posts and comments from the social networks Facebook and Twitter were collected: 72 comments incorporating stance taking on Donald Trump‘s posts, and 75 comments including stance taking on Hillary Clinton‘s posts. The results of the empirical data analysis showed that the affective stance was expressed by linguistic as well as multimodal means.

This paper addresses stance-taking in an online media as nowadays people utilize them for several functions. Online media refers to communication technologies using the internet to present or exchange information. Online media used for several purposes such as selling products; advertising; sharing news, pictures, video, or information; or discussing such topics as politics, entertainment, education, and culinary. In achieving its goal, online media is systematically design. Every sentence has sort of persuasion, argumentation, and evaluation in an explicit way or implied to get better interaction with the readers. It needs the aspect of stance, which refers to lexical and grammatical expression of attitudes, feeling, judgments, or commitment cornering the proportional content of the message (Biber and Finegan in Myers: 2003,254). Stance is considered as important concept in linguistics which brings a wide range on how utterances' meanings are expressed and how speakers (or writers) address their audience. Applying descriptive qualitative research, this paper is aimed at elicitting kinds of stance-taking utilized in google.com as one of the biggest online media. The researcher compiled the data by collecting the sentences which represent the act of stance taking then categorizing the kinds of stance-taking. The research resulted in finding that there are three kinds of stance: epistemic, attitudinal, and stylistic stance. Epistemic stance deals with the marking of certainty and uncertainty of the facts. Attitudinal stance concerns on personal perspective, aesthetic preference, as well as moral judgment or emotional response. Then, stylistic stance deals with the way of expressing idea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores 60 individual narratives of illness presented in the initiating messages of threads that are posted in a well-known virtual space, 'Tianya Hospital' (天涯医院), in China. 'Tianya Hospital' is a discussion board where website users discuss their own or their loved ones' health problems with other participants, who may be either health experts or patients with similar illnesses. Adopting the approach of mediated discourse analysis, the study aims to find out what is narrated (i.e., narrative presentation categories), what stance is taken and what the patterns and functions of the narrative presentation and the stance taking are. Some narrative presentation categories identified in this study are to some degree associated with existing face-to-face medical consultation phases, while others are related to a 'timescale' frame and the 'sick role' concept. The findings also show that the online narratives present not only the description of health problems, but also epistemic and affective stances. Some features of the narrative presentation organization and the stance taking in narratives can perform particular functions, such as serving to legitimize patients' or patients' caregivers' complaints about healthcare services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both news media and politicians, taking advantage of their cultural authority through spoken and written texts, contribute to forming public opinion, in particular with the use of discursive means, to shape the way people understand migration. Research has so far pointed to negative representations of the Other and argumentation against migrants and refugees revolves around the topoi of burden, illegality, insecurity, violence and threat, which are known to trigger emotions such as resentment, anger and fear. However, media coverage of refugees' arrivals can also contribute to a positive construction of migrants' identities: this is what has been called 'counter-narrative', i.e. a set of narratives aimed at changing the mainstream discourse, which is overwhelmingly negative. This study focuses on the thematic, lexical and syntactic choices in Greek Cypriot and French communist newspapers (Haravgi and L'Humanité respectively) and the choices used to construct an argumentation which fosters the inclusion of migrants. Focusing mainly on headlines, the study adopts critical discourse approaches (Wodak 2001, inter alia; van Dijk 2001, inter alia) and uses tools from corpus linguistics methodologies (Bednarek 2008; Baker et al. 2008; van Dijk 1995, inter alia) to extract and analyze salient lexical items. The results show similarities in the way stance is constructed, for instance an anti EU stance is common to both newspapers, however the Greek Cypriot newspaper appeals to Christian values to foster charity and empathy, and the French newspaper appeal to the legal rights of migrants and the French citizen's duty to foster solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution focuses on the shrug as it is used in stance taking contexts in face-to-face conversations. The shrug qualifies as a 'compound enactment', in which prototypically different gestures are combined: "the eye-brows (which are being raised), the hands (which are turned so that the palms face up), the forearms (which may be lifted), and the shoulders (which are also raised). In addition, the head may be tilted" (Streeck 2009: 189. Gesturecraft. The manu-facture of meaning. Amsterdam: Benjamins). More recent studies show that instead of a head tilt, a headshake can also be a part of the shrug (Schoonjans 2014. Modalpartikeln als multimodale Konstruktionen: Eine korpusbasierte Kookkurrenzanalyse von Modalpartikeln und Gestik im Deutschen. Leuven: KU Leuven dissertation). We report on an empirical study, in which the shrug or some of its gestural components are used to express obviousness on the part of the speaker. Although our data reveal multimodal patterns in the expression of obviousness, this study singles out the gestural dimension. The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 explains the methodological aspects of our study, after which Section 3 presents the formal and quantitative results, illustrated with four examples. The paper ends in Section 4 with a brief discussion of our major findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study aimed at investigating gender identity through the expression of interpersonal metadiscourse stance marking. The current study investigated male and female authors' pattern of stance markers utilization, focusing on totally 60 English and Persian articles, and English articles written by Persian speakers. Based on Xu and Longs'(2008) classification, five categories of stance markers (textual, epistemic, attitudinal, deontic and causation) were identified and the frequencies of their occurrences were computed. The differences in each group were investigated separately through running chi-square tests. Regarding English articles, it was found that both male and female writers used the same pattern of stance taking except the epistemic markers. Another finding of this study was that both male and female writers followed the same pattern of stance taking in Persian articles except the deontic ones. In English articles written by Persian speakers, female writers used the same pattern as their native counterparts, while male ones were affected mostly by their native language. Attending to stance taking patterns, this article provides an informative picture which illustrates the common preferences of disciplinary community especially between male and female writers. Hence, the implications of this study can be helpful in academic writing, in assessment, and textbooks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present study, I seek to examine narrative in consideration of three of its most important dimensions: the social (others’ narratives), the cognitive (acquisition of knowledge through stories), and the linguistic (acquiring and producing knowledge through language). There is no point of contention that ‘narrative’ is essentially communicative and dependent on a sociolinguistic and cultural context. Yet, with regard to fictional narratives, recent studies on text processing challenge the view of text as communication in its conventional sense. I explore the way(s) in which fictional worlds communicate from the constructivist standpoint and set out to develop the notion of narratorial stance. I then make use of the concept in the close reading section of the paper in order to examine and exemplify the modes in which Hornby’s homodiegetic narrators represent themselves and the others in their ‘turn-at-talk’ or stance-taking acts

This paper discusses the process through which cultural ideas, knowledge and beliefs mediating the encounter between an audience and a text are fabricated in and enacted by everyday naturally occurring dialogues. We contend that the cultural knowledge framing any hermeneutic dialogue is communicatively constituted in daily discourses, dialogues and interactions that often concern the texts and text-related practices. By taking a developmental perspective on the role of everyday talk in the making of media ideologies, this paper empirically illustrates how human beings become cultural beings inasmuch as they are inherently dialogic beings. Examples of adult-child interactions collected during ethnographic fieldwork are discussed to illustrate how dialogues occasioned by media use are organized by the worldviews of a given community. Yet, at one and the same time, they (re)produce the value system, moral order and the canonical versions of the world for those who engage in these talking activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates resonance (Du Bois 2003, 2007) in second stories as a method of anchoring the second telling to the previous telling and as a resource of stance taking. It takes a closer look at the exact ways in which second stories are structurally shaped through initial (first) tellings by examining the resonating elements (of the first stories) that the second tellers recycle in their second stories, i.e., resonating lexico-syntactic, structural, prosodie, and semantic elements. Tellers legitimize, firstly, their tellings by tying back to the previous story and, secondly, their stance by positioning themselves in view of the stance displayed in the previous story. The resonating second story as such can manifest the recipients' interpretation of what they make of the first story and provide a new angle on the first telling, either reinforcing, redefining, or rejecting the gist of the initial telling. Resonance in second stories manifests the fundamental social cohesion that conversationalists uphold, among other ways, by tying back to each other's words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study we examined how the issue which is generally referred to as the "Kurdish problem", is dealt with in daily speech today. We used positioning theory to look at the relationship between the participants and the Kurdish problem. We used the 'Dağlıca Event' -an armed clash between PKK and Turkish army that led to arguments in Turkey's political agenda- as a prompt in focus group meetings. By analyzing the position that the participants adopted during focus group talks, we evaluated what they were able to achieve interactionally. We tried to examine how the participants made sense of and commented on the "Kurdish problem" with their positionings. When we look at the contents of these positioning, we saw that the participants determined implicit sides in the Kurdish question. The taking up of positions determined by the sides made it possible to observe how the participants accounted for the roles of the other sides and themselves in the context of this relating, and how they related the "Kurdish question" that was on the agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on parenting and children's game play. The study is based on an ethnographic study of 32 American middle-class families and takes a discourse analytic approach. Earlier research has argued that parenting styles are dependent on social class, ethnicity, and gender. The present data reveal considerable diversity in how middle-class parents deal with game play, which is currently one of the most common child and youth leisure activities. This diversity is seen across stances taken within the same interview and across interviews. It is argued that differences in middle-class families' parenting styles are related to their view of the child and their stance on game technology. In addition, talk about parenting reveals parents' construction of good and bad parenting, where they see themselves as belonging to the former category. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: Reported speech has a significant role as a practice of stance taking in conversational storytelling. The dialogic nature of reported speech is reflected in the reporting speaker''s capacity to simultaneously assign a stance to and take a stance on the reported speaker and event. The current paper focuses on the relationship of the lexico-syntactic and the embodied features of enactments in stance taking. The paper adds to previous research the notion of reporting space, a frame for potential active multimodal involvement in the stance-taking activity by all participants of the telling event. The teller enacts a character''s talk and embodiment in a virtual space and place of the telling, thus setting up a reporting space which allows further enactments from all participants of the storytelling event. The analyses of the examples show that recipients indeed make use of the reporting space provided by the teller and produce subsequent, fitting enactments. They make use of the reporting space, i.e. the reference points provided by the prior enactments, in producing such further enactments, which adds further elements to and elaborates the reporting space. The recipients tie their multimodal contributions to the reporting space by way of resonating lexico-syntactic, prosodic and embodied features. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this paper I argue that stance in discourse is not the transparent linguistic packaging of ‘internal states’ of knowledge, but rather emerges from dialogic interaction between interlocutors. Thus, stance is more properly viewed from an intersubjective vantage point, rather than being regarded as primarily a subjective dimension of language. I begin by outlining patterns of epistemic stance marking within the speech of single speakers and show that these arise from the intersubjectivity between conversational co-participants. Then, I focus on stance taking as a joint activity between participants in story reception sequences and demonstrate that stances often emerge as a result of joint engagement in evaluative activity. Finally, I concentrate on how the particular linguistic resources used for stance taking fit into the intersubjective pattern by demonstrating syntactic, semantic, and prosodic resonances between contributions by different speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to shed light on the question of how interactants use the concurrent organizations of assessments and three different gaze patterns as resources for stance taking in everyday conversation. The data come from two recordings of everyday conversation. The aim of this paper is two-fold. First, it aims to show that stance taking is an intersubjective and collaborative social activity in which interactants, by relying on various linguistic and interactional resources, construct stances based on stances by prior speakers. Second, it suggests that the investigated three gaze patterns play an important role in the stance-taking activity. The data show that although the interrelationship between gaze and assessments is manifold, certain gaze patterns are interdependent with the making of assessments and therefore gaze and assessments can be seen to function together as resources for interactional stance taking. Additionally, these gaze patterns act as resources for the coparticipants in tracing the meanings of coparticipants' stances. However, it is not claimed that these gaze patterns have meanings in themselves or that they would implicate a speaker stance, but rather that together with language, gaze is an important element in interactants' intersubjective stance taking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]