Volume 43, Issue 5 - Special Issue: Stancetaking in Motion: Grammar and Stance Activities in East and Southeast Asian Languages; Guest Editor: Shoichi Iwasaki

Revealing one’s evaluation towards a shared target of stance will likely set off a chain of reactions among all participants in an interaction. This interactive activity widely recognized as stancetaking has attracted the attention of researchers in a variety of fields of inquiry. This paper intends to enrich this line of research by revealing details of stancetaking as an evolving process. It proposes to do so by recognizing two separate layers relevant for stance progression. The first is the external layer where participants physically exchange utterances in order to negotiate their stances. The second is the internal layer where each participant interacts with his/her own internalized and internalizing knowledge. To demonstrate these points, I will analyze excerpts of English conversations between unacquainted speakers who experienced a common major incident in their daily lives (an earthquake and a false missile alarm incident). I will also use a conversation in Thai to demonstrate how a speaker indexes her changing evaluation toward a third person by alternating different third person pronouns.

This study adopts the idea of ‘stance triangle’ and ‘double dialogicality’ and examines the use of animal classifiers for human referents in the stance negotiation process in Cantonese. Drawing on the data from a Corpus of Mid-twentieth-century Hong Kong Cantonese, this study explores how participants deploy two animal classifiers (i.e.,  tiu4 , a classifier for fish , and zek3 , a classifier for animal ) to express their negative stance towards another person. The present study specifically analyzes three examples where the relationships between the stance subjects (SS1-SSn) and stance objects (O) are different: O is present in the interaction in one instance, and absent in the other two instances. My analysis suggests that upon the display of negative stance towards O by the original stance subject, other stance subjects can deny the ‘joint attention’ to avoid establishing any alignment link with the original stance taker as a way of negotiating their stance. I propose an extended model of ‘stance triangle’ which better captures the fluidity and dialogicality in the stance negotiation process.

It has been recognized that Mandarin speakers use the neutral form ( ni ) and the honorific form ( nin ) of second-person pronouns to refer to others based on the social distance and power dynamics between the speakers. Drawing on eighteen hours of journalist-government official conversations in live broadcast TV programs, this study shows that the journalists often shift between the two forms of second-person pronouns when referring to government officials and that the shifts in the two directions appear in different sequential environments. Incorporating the stance triangle model and membership categorization devices, the findings reveal that the shifts indicate changes in the journalists’ self-categorization and their evaluative stances toward the officials in the conversation. The shift from nin to ni tends to occur in the main actions where the interviewer has previously displayed a positive stance but shifts to a negative stance while holding the official accountable; the shift from ni to nin is often used rhetorically to help construct the inconsistencies and self-contradictions of the officials, which also indicates a negative stance.

This paper looks into the specific pragmatic functions of Cantonese utterance final particles (UFPs) employed in a televised political debate, hosted by the Television Broadcasts Limited in 2016. The paper explores the most frequently used UFPs and discusses how they are being manipulated with two prominent questioning strategies, i.e., hypophora and question cascade, to help project negative stance in this highly institutionalized discourse genre. With the aid of the theoretical framework of ‘stance triangle’, I investigate how various stance-taking activities are navigated through the employment of two questioning strategies as well as UFPs to establish dis-alignment among the electoral candidates. The findings show that the most frequently used UFPs are le1 and aa3 : these two UFPs are relatively neutral in question design in daily conversation and are used in all types of question such as polar questions, alternative questions, and content questions. The findings demonstrate that these particles serve as a mitigator and softener with the strategic use of hypophora and question cascade. This paper also proposes a revised stance triangle that helps understand how the negative stances are navigated in questioning strategies and realize the stance objects in an explicit manner. Discovering the true stance objects reveals that the question designs are usually oriented to the “remote audiences,”i.e. the voters.

Pragmatic markers are linguistic resources, many of them highly ubiquitous, that provide speakers with a means to display their stance toward a given proposition and, at the same time, toward their fellow interlocutors and others. Using naturally-occurring spoken data from the Sejong Spoken Corpus, we examine the role of Korean pragmatic marker com as an interactional resource for stance management in conversation. We integrate a ‘stance triangle’ framework and a dialogicality model that involves both ‘internal’ and ‘external’ dialogic processes, and analyze how Korean com is recruited as a face-threat mitigator to attenuate the assertive force of a speaker’s utterance in a variety of conversational contexts. Our findings indicate that the use of com is frequently motivated by sociocultural values, reframed as politeness norms, which prompt speakers to modulate their position in ways that mitigate face-loss for both themselves and others. We thus propose an expanded version of the ‘stance triangle’ for situations involving mitigation acts whereby, in potentially dis-aligning contexts, the speaker’s external positioning toward the stance object often does not directly nor fully reflect their internal evaluation, indicating a frequent desire among fellow interlocutors to preserve solidarity with each other.

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.