Skip to navigation – Site map

HomeCall for papersCall for papers – closedN°32 - Thematic issue: Stancetaking

N°32 - Thematic issue: Stancetaking

Submission deadline: 15 December 2020

Laure Gardelle, Sophie Herment et Henri Le Prieult

Any discourse object involves stance, defined by Rabatel (2012: 23) as ‘the fact that the original utterer refers to objects of discourse while positioning him/herself relative to them, indicating from what perspective and within what frame they are being considered’. The present volume focuses more specifically on stancetaking. Stancetaking may be the result of a deliberate act (posture, ‘attitude’, for Rabatel 2012), as when stance is adjusted for argumentative purposes, or when a speaker opts for a stance that constructs a given identity. Alternatively, stancetaking may result from categorisation by a third party: a speaker using nonstandard forms, for example, is not necessarily aware of it, but if categorised as ‘poorly educated’ (or any other kind of differential valuation) by an outside observer, that observer positions the speaker relative to a norm (prescriptive, social, geographical, communal) taken as reference point.

As regards deliberate stancetaking, the points of interest for this issue of Anglophonia include the following questions (the list is non exhaustive).

  • What kinds of personal or sociocultural identity does stance convey: is the construction necessarily at odds with the norm regarded as dominant (the speaker might even claim membership of a micro-community of practice, see Eckert 2000), or may it be regarded as part and parcel of the dominant norm? As this kind of stancetaking typically goes together with a valuation of the dominant norm, studies seeking to establish the linguistic traces of such valuation are also welcome.

  • For the addressee or the observer, can some traces of stancetaking be identified as reliable markers of a deliberate strategy?

  • How are addressees, co-utterers, positioned relative to these choices? How can they respond to such imposed positioning – are there forms of rejection, correction, re-orientation, or conversely, of accommodation (Giles et al. 1991, Albrespit et al. 2017, 2018)? Besides, in interactional contexts, how is stancetaking co-constructed, and how does it evolve in the course of the interaction: are there preferred linguistic forms among speakers in authority, or unexpected reactions on the addressees’ part, for instance?

  • Does a given linguistic marker always have the same effects, or are there additional effects stemming from the context of use? Leblanc & Martinez (2005: §1), for example, establish an influence of co-occurrents, as well as of frequency in context, in New Year’s Eve speeches of the French presidents of the 5th Republic.

  • In what areas of discourse does deliberate stancetaking manifest itself most blatantly? Obvious answers include discourse markers, prosody, modality, reported speech, or information packaging choices; studies focusing on these elements are indeed fully relevant to the volume. But what about creative, ad hoc uses of grammatical constructions for instance (e.g. (all) X-ed out as in coffeed out, Hugou 2013)? Moreover, what does their possible propagation reveal, and how is linguistic competition dealt with (e.g. between coffeed out and overcoffeed)? And are there other, less studied, forms of stancetaking?

  • What is the use of explicitly positing an original speech form – which sometimes proves not to have really existed, as shown by research on rephrasing (in cases of evolution of the referential content between what is presented as rephrasing and the context which precedes, e.g. Pennec 2017) or reported speech (e.g. quotation effects, as in ‘Safe, safe, safe’, the pulse of the house beats softly, De Mattia-Viviès 2006)?

When stancetaking is not a deliberate act on the part of the speaker, but is rather carried out by a third party, one point at issue is how this third party positions him/herself, whether s/he is contemporary to the original speaker or lives in a later period (diachronic studies): is the attitude one of righteousness, superiority, observation, or other; what use is the study of variations from an alleged norm, how is that study carried out, and to what end? Besides, does the researcher’s stance constitute a specific form of stancetaking? Contributions on this issue may include studies of interlanguage in L2 acquisition.

From a more theoretical point of view, the study of stancetaking will contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between the concepts of utterer (‘the origin of points of view’, Rabatel 2012: 24) and speaker (‘the original instance which materially produces the utterances’, ibid.). Sociolinguistic studies (such as Jaffe 2009) tend to consider the identities of speakers within a community of practice; and in the English-speaking world, the concept of utterer is far less common than that of speaker. Is it relevant to draw a distinction between utterer and speaker, especially outside the fields of reported speech and other forms of polyphony? What does the concept of ‘utterer stance’ add to that of ‘speaker’, or even ‘cross-speaker’, stance?

Both case studies and more quantitative analyses are welcome, on any kind of genre, time reference, and variety of English. Linguistic, phonetic, prosodic, non-verbal (especially kinesic) dimensions may be considered, as well as multimodal approaches. In all cases, a linguistic reflection, beyond the stylistic specificities of a given speaker, is encouraged.

Co-editors: Laure Gardelle and Sophie Herment

Submissions should be sent to: Laure.Gardelle [a] univ-grenoble-alpes.fr, sophie.herment [a] univ-amu.fr, henri.le-prieult [a] univ-tlse2.fr

Please follow the author guidelines for submission: https://journals.openedition.org/anglophonia/353

Important dates

  • Call for papers: January 2020

  • Manuscript submissions: 15 December 2020

  • Reviewing: January-March 2021

  • Submission of revised papers: September 2021

  • Publication: autumn 2021

Bibliography

Selected references

Albrespit, Jean, Lacassain-Lagoin, Christelle, & Henri Le Prieult (dir.). 2017. Modes et stratégies d’accommodation. Anglophonia 24. < https://journals.openedition.org/anglophonia/1092>

Albrespit, Jean, Lacassain-Lagoin, Christelle, & Henri Le Prieult (dir.). 2018. De l’accommodation à la non-accommodation : procédés et stratégies. Anglophonia 25.

< https://journals.openedition.org/anglophonia/1299>

Charaudeau, Patrick. 2006. Discours journalistique et positionnements énonciatifs. Frontières et dérives. Semen 22. <http://journals.openedition.org/semen/2793>

De Mattia-Viviès, Monique. 2006. De la porosité des formes du discours rapporté aux cas de déconnexion forme / sens dans l’univers du récit. In C. Delesse (dir.), Approche(s) linguistique(s) et/ou traductologique(s). Arras: Artois Presses Université, pp. 29-52.

Eckert, Penelope. 2000. Linguistic Variation as Social Practice. Oxford: Blackwell.

Giles, Howard, Coupland, Nikolas, & Justine Coupland. 1991. Accommodation theory: Communication, context, and consequence. In H. Giles, J. Coupland, & N. Coupland (eds.), Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction. Contexts of Accommodation: Developments in Applied Sociolinguistics. Cambridge: CUP, pp. 1-68.

Hugou, Vincent. 2013. Productivité et émergence du sens. L’exemple de la construction (all) X-ed out dans un corpus de blogs et de forums de discussion. Thèse de doctorat, non publiée, Université Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle.

Jaffe, Alexandra (ed.). 2009. Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford UP.

Leblanc, Jean-Marc & William Martinez. 2005. Positionnements énonciatifs dans les vœux présidentiels sous la cinquième République : analyse des marques personnelles par les méthodes de cooccurrence. Corpus 4. <http://journals.openedition.org/corpus/347>

Pennec, Blandine. 2017. Réajustement(s) du discours en anglais contemporain. Londres: ISTE.

Rabatel, Alain. 2012. Positions, positionnements et postures de l’énonciateur. Travaux neuchâtelois de linguistique 56, pp. 23-42. <https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00769273/document>

Top of page
Search OpenEdition Search

You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search