Stance

Elena Negrea-Busuioc, National University of Political Studies and Public Administration, Romania
elena.negrea@comunicare.ro

Stance, evaluation, and, with the advent of social media, sentiment are concepts describing people’s opinions (judgements) about an issue, which are often interchangeably used in public opinion research. Individual opinions emerge from the interaction between individuals and the world in which they live. Such opinions are judgements (evaluative stances) of issues made by individuals based on their psychological and cognitive predispositions. To form an opinion about an issue implies to have taken a stance on that particular issue. However, unless their opinion is publicly expressed (via language, usually) one cannot have access to the stance that an individual has taken on an issue on which they have an opinion. Expressing an evaluative stance means participating in a dialogic process where meanings are collaboratively constructed and negotiated in and through interaction in various contexts.

Linguistic approaches to opinionated communication distinguish between stance and evaluation: stance is a more abstract concept, whereas evaluation is the linguistic realisation of stance; the display and manifestation of stance in discursive interaction. From a linguistic perspective, stance is defined as the expression of speaker’s or writer’s opinions and assessments encoded in language they produce. Speakers/writers may convey assessments of the certainty or doubt (epistemic stance) or personal attitudes, judgements, emotions about the propositions they express (attitudinal stance or affect), or they may even assess the style of the communication (style stance, per Gray and Biber).

Research on the evaluative function of language has inventoried the linguistic markers of stance and grouped them into parameters of evaluation (e.g., (in)comprehensibility, emotivity, (un)expectedness, (im)possibility, reliability, evidentiality, per Bednarek) which may be used to examine opinions in a more nuanced way than simply as positive or negative attitudes or feelings about an issue held by an individual at a certain moment and in a particular context.

Keywords: evaluation, stance, sentiment, opinion, judgements

Related Entries: Evaluative Language, Judgement (1), Judgement (2), Sentiment

References:
Bednarek, M. (2006). Evaluation in media discourse: Analysis of a newspaper corpus. Continuum.
Gray, B., & Biber, D. (2012). Current conceptions of stance. In K. Hyland and C. Sancho Guinda (Eds.). Stance and voice in written academic genres (pp. 15-33). Palgrave Macmillan.