Stance in action

Stance is a concept that can be used to examine language-in-use in the most diverse settings. It has been used to study, to provide only a few examples, Mexican immigrant youth slang, patterns of social distinction, weight loss discussions, and the discourse of news interviews. (Jaffe 2009; Englebretson 2007.) In the following, I will present some key findings from a number of studies on stance. Findings that relate to the topic and area of this study will be further highlighted and discussed.

Haarman and Lombardo (2009) looked into how stances were expressed in war news.

Using a combination of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, they carried out analyses on how reporters expressed stance while reporting on the first month of the Iraqi war in 2003. An important portion of their study looked at the use of the personal pronouns ‘we’ and ‘you’ in taking stances. Their findings indicate that it is not always easy to determine who is included in these groupings, and they state: “The interpretation of pronouns in such instances then requires cooperation between the speaker/writer and the addressee, and it is often the addressee who decides who is included in the pronoun reference.” (Haarman and Lombardo 2009: 73.)

Of the pronoun ‘you’, Haarman and Lombardo state that it is most often used to construct a more personal relationship between a news anchor and the audience (Haarman and Lombardo 2009: 80). Similarly, ‘we’ is occasionally used to construe common values between the reporter or news team and the audience. In all cases, these pronouns were used to signal the relationship between the presenters and the television audience in some way (Haarman and Lombardo 2009: 94). These findings may become relevant later in this study when analyzing if and how vloggers utilize personal pronouns in taking stances.

Haddington (2005) has studied stance-taking in talk-in-interaction. His data mostly comprises news interviews, which is a rather similar setting to that of Haarman and Lombardo. Haddington points out that the stances of political figures will accrue over time, which contributes to the social construction of their personhood (Haddington 2005: 129). Stances are therefore not just single acts, but stances taken contribute to the

wider perception of a person’s communication style, role, and personality.

Haddington’s research includes not just verbal data, but also embodiment (such as gaze, gestures, etc.) as a resource for stance-taking (Haddington 2005: 88). Of the inclusion of this data, Haddington (2005: 89) points out:

In the following I do not claim that a particular gesture or any other embodied practice alone is expressive of a speaker stance. Rather, I suggest a way to examine how combinations of these practices contribute to the interlocutors’ intersubjective stance taking, i.e. I emphasize that in order to investigate the role that embodied practices have in stance taking, it is necessary to study how they are used together with the concurrent linguistic and interactional practices during a stance-taking activity.

As stated earlier, this is also the intention of the current study. A multimodal analysis comprises many modes that must be analyzed both separately and together to determine how they contribute to stances taken. Haddington’s point of view is therefore highly compatible with the aims of this study.

Haddington (2005: 90) notes that modalities besides language should be taken into account while investigating stances, as it is an established fact that human beings do not use solely language to communicate in face-to-face interaction. He also points out that the role of gaze, in particular, has been largely neglected in studies of stance.

Haddington does indeed examine gaze behavior in his own study, finding gaze patterns that contribute to stances expressed. He also expresses some important points about the lines between modalities, pointing out that some researchers prefer not to draw lines between different modalities at all, and rather look into their combined effect. However, Haddington points out that it is possible to do both at the same time, exploring both how a certain modality (e.g. gesture) plays into stance-taking on its own, and how it contributes to stance concurrent with other modalities. This is a point that I will consider in my own research design.

Several scholars have studied the stance functions of common linguistic expressions.

Keisanen (2006) studied the functions of negative yes/no interrogatives and tag questions. Kärkkäinen (2003) looked into the interactional functions of the phrase ‘I think’. In another publication, Kärkkäinen (2007, in Englebretson 2007) performed a similar process for the related expression of ‘I guess’. What all of these studies have in common is the finding that there is no clear link between an expression and its

intended use. The same expression can even be used in different situations to take up completely opposite stances. This drives home the point that there is no simplistic relationship between linguistic items and stance; and any item that seemingly expresses stance should always be considered in its proper context to determine its actual effect.

Keisanen’s study focused on epistemic stance, but her findings indicate that epistemic stances often possess highly interactional functions, as she explains here (Keisanen 2006: 183):

Showing commitment to the status of the information that one is providing, i.e. marking epistemic stance, was shown to be an essentially interactive activity. First of all, the very initial placement of epistemic markers in intonation units or utterances can be seen as interactionally motivated: establishing stance before the upcoming utterance helps recipients to align themselves to the unfolding utterance, sometimes only a word that needs qualification in the course of the utterance’s production. Secondly, stance is not just an isolated mental position of an individual speaker that randomly “surfaces” at various points in the discourse, it is firmly rooted in and engendered by the interaction between the conversational coparticipants: stance displays manifest aspects of that interaction such as managing routine trouble spots, engaging in more strategic recipient design, pursuing uptake or signaling completion of one’s turn-at-talk.

This suggests that even when speakers are positioning themselves not relative to other subjects, but to subject matters, they are still performing interactional actions and achieving interactional goals. Stance, then, is interactional by its very nature; it is used not only to convey information, but also to negotiate interpersonal relationships between participants.

What happens to this interactional nature of stance when communication is no longer face-to-face and two-sided, but is instead mediated? In the vlog setting, neither the video bloggers nor their fans as commenters are able to receive immediate feedback.

It seems clear that this would likely alter stance-taking activities. Very little research has been done on stance through mediated communication. This study will hopefully begin the process of filling that gap.

3 THE PRESENT STUDY