Research

In its orientation, the project combines the insights of functional linguistics with the methodological approach of conversation analysis, being thus situated in the growing new field of interactional linguistics.

The motivation behind our more specific research questions is the all-encompassing idea that stance, rather than being a rigid product of an individual speaker, emerges from dialogic interaction between conversational co-participants. Here we owe a great deal to our project partner John Du Bois (see publications), who has advocated a view of stance as a linguistically articulated form of social action involving both a dialogic and an intersubjective dimension (e.g. Du Bois 1999, 2002, 2003, 2007). He proposes the stance triangle as a unified framework for understanding stance (2007): when a social actor takes a stance, he or she at once evaluates an object, positions the subject (usually the self), and aligns with other subjects. The dialogicality of stance finds a further concrete expression within the theory of dialogic syntax developed by Du Bois (2001): stances build on each other dialogically and often involve considerable structural parallelism and resonance of the linguistic resources deployed.

Elise Kärkkäinen has approached stance taking from a number of perspectives. She has found further arguments in favor of stance as an intersubjective rather than primarily a subjective dimension of language (especially Kärkkäinen 2006), Thus, she shows (2003a) patterns of epistemic stance-marking to arise from the intersubjectivity between conversational co-participants, and further that stances often only emerge as a result of joint engagement in evaluative activity (2002, 2003b, 2006). One further focus of her work has been a linguistic routine or practice, which is examined within its sequential context and viewed as an emergent and contingent display of stance or an organizer of stance taking activity (cf. 2003a for I think , 2005 and 2007 for I guess ).

Pentti Haddington 's dissertation The intersubjectivity of stance taking in talk-in-interaction (2005 and several articles) focuses primarily on two questions. First, Haddington investigates some recurrent linguistic and interactional patterns of stance taking in British and American news interviews. More specifically he considers the ways in which interviewers set up difficult positions for interviewees and the ways in which the interviewees align with these positions. Second, he analyses the use of gaze in assessment sequences in everyday talk and shows that particular uses of gaze are closely tied with the type of assessment being done.

Tiina Keisanen 's dissertation Patterns of stance taking: Negative yes/no interrogatives and tag questions in spoken American English (2006) examines stance at the level of both linguistic practices and conversational action, as it is manifested in negative yes/no interrogatives and tag questions. The interactional analyses concentrate on revealing the ways in which the negotiation of alignment and the display of stance becomes visible while speakers carry out such actions as challenges, requests for confirmation, disagreements and assessments.

Mirka Rauniomaa 's dissertation Repetition as a resumptive strategy of stance taking in spoken English and Finnish (forthcoming in 2008) examines how speakers repeat their utterances in order to indicate that they expected a (different kind of) response from the recipients and to offer their utterances for reconsideration. In employing 'recovery through repetition' speakers take stances that can be seen as resisting a current course of action and negotiating the input of a prior utterance. Rauniomaa explores the uses of this resource in American English and Finnish conversations.

Maarit Niemelä 's dissertation Intersubjective practices of storytelling (forthcoming in 2009) explores the role of sequential, interactive storytelling in conversational stance taking in British and American English. Interactive storytelling refers to stories told by an initial teller and augmented by an active recipient, and to so-called second stories told after the first one. The assumption is that storytelling is recipient-oriented activity, and the focus lies on the interactional practices and linguistic patterns (e.g. explicit evaluation, reported speech, resonance, second stories) of expressing affiliation, alignment and a shared stance.