Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives

by Alexandra Jaffe

Overview

All communication involves acts of stance, in which speakers take up positions vis-a-vis the expressive, referential, interactional and social implications of their speech. This book brings together contributions in a new and dynamic current of academic explorations of stancetaking as a sociolinguistic phenomenon. Drawing on data from such diverse contexts as advertising, tourism, historical texts, naturally occurring conversation, classroom interaction and interviews, leading authors in the field of sociolinguistics in this volume explore how linguistic stancetaking is implicated in the representation of self, personal style and acts of stylization, and self- and other-positioning. The analyses also focus on how speakers deploy and take up stances vis-a-vis sociolinguistic variables and the critical role of stance in the processes of indexicalization: how linguistic forms come to be associated with social categories and meanings. In doing so, many of the authors address critical issues of power and social reproduction, examining how stance is implicated in the production, reproduction and potential change of social and linguistic hierarchies and ideologies. This volume maps out the terrain of existing sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological research on stance, synthesizes how it relates to existing theoretical orientations, and identifies a framework for future research.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195331646
Publisher:	Oxford University Press, USA
Publication date:	06/04/2009
Series:	Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics Series
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Alexandra Jaffe is Professor of Linguistics and Anthropology, CSU Long Beach. She is the author of Ideologies in Action: Language Politics in Corsica.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: The Sociolinguistics of Stance, Alexandra Jaffe
2. Stance, Style, and the Linguistic Individual, Barbara Johnstone
3. How Mr. Taylor Lost His Footing: Stance in a Colonial Encounter, Judith Irvine
4. Stance and Distance: Social Boundaries, Self-lamination and Metalinguistic Anxiety in White Kenyan Narratives about the African Occult, Janet McIntosh
5. Moral Irony and Moral Personhood in Sakapultek Discourse and Culture, Robin Shoaps
6. Stance in a Corsican school: Institutional and Ideological Orders and the production of Bilingual Subjects, Alexandra Jaffe
7. From Stance to Style: Gender, Interaction, and Indexicality in Mexican Immigrant Youth Slang, Mary Bucholtz
8. Style as Stance: Stance as the Explanation for Patterns of Sociolinguistic Variation, Scott Kiesling
9. Taking an Elitist Stance: Ideology and the Discursive Production of Social Distinction, Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow
10. Attributing Stance in Discourses of Body Shape and Weight Loss, Justine Coupland and Nikolas Coupland

Editorial Reviews

"Stance covers every facet of the field, from variationist to interactionist to ethnographic sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, providing a unifying concept which allows for exciting new avenues of analysis. This is a major contribution toward untangling the web of relationships between agency and structuration, and toward understanding the complex processes of social change." —Monica Heller, University of Toronto

From the Publisher