Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-pftt2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-30T18:22:08.428Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Integrating qualitative and quantitative analyses of stance: A case study of English that/zero variation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2021

Timothy Gadanidis Open the ORCID record for Timothy Gadanidis [Opens in a new window] ,
Angelika Kiss Open the ORCID record for Angelika Kiss [Opens in a new window] ,
Lex Konnelly Open the ORCID record for Lex Konnelly [Opens in a new window] ,
Katharina Pabst Open the ORCID record for Katharina Pabst [Opens in a new window] ,
Lisa Schlegl Open the ORCID record for Lisa Schlegl [Opens in a new window] ,
Pocholo Umbal Open the ORCID record for Pocholo Umbal [Opens in a new window]  and
Sali A. Tagliamonte Open the ORCID record for Sali A. Tagliamonte [Opens in a new window]
Timothy Gadanidis
Affiliation:
University of Toronto, Canada
Angelika Kiss*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto, Canada
Lex Konnelly
Affiliation:
University of Toronto, Canada
Katharina Pabst
Affiliation:
University of Toronto, Canada
Lisa Schlegl
Affiliation:
University of Toronto, Canada
Pocholo Umbal
Affiliation:
University of Toronto, Canada
Sali A. Tagliamonte
Affiliation:
University of Toronto, Canada
*
Address for correspondence: Angelika Kiss University of Toronto, Department of Linguistics Sidney Smith Hall, 4th Floor, 100 St. George Street Toronto, ON M5S 3G3, Canada angelika.kiss@mail.utoronto.ca
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Previous work has shown that stance—the way speakers position themselves with respect to what they are talking about and who they are talking to—provides powerful insights into why speakers choose certain linguistic variants, beyond correlations with macro-social categories such as gender, ethnicity, and social class. However, as stancetaking moves are highly context-dependent, they have rarely been explored quantitatively, making the observed variable patterns difficult to generalize. This article seeks to contribute to this methodological gap by proposing a formal guide to coding stance and demonstrating how it can be operationalized quantitatively. Drawing on a corpus of eight individuals, self-recorded in three situations with varying levels of social distance, we apply this method to variation between English complementizers that and zero (i.e. no overt complementizer), providing a replicable and theoretically grounded protocol that incorporates both quantitative and qualitative analyses in a variationist sociolinguistic study. (Stance, complementizers, that, English)*

Type
Article
Information
Language in Society , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , February 2023 , pp. 27 - 50
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

We are grateful to all students in the Fall 2017 LIN1152 seminar on stylistic variation at the University of Toronto, and in particular to Emily Blamire, Nicole Hildebrand-Edgar, and Isabelle Ladouceur-Séguin, who were involved in various ways in developing our methodology and recording conversational data. We also thank the University of Toronto Language Variation and Change research group, the audiences at CVC 10 and NWAV 47, Monica Heller, Erez Levon, Scott Kiesling, and several anonymous reviewers for feedback and suggestions on this research and the paper.

This research has been funded by research grants to Tagliamonte from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Government of Ontario, the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto and the Ontario Trillium Scholarship (Pabst), as well as by Tagliamonte's Canada Research Chair in Language Variation and Change.

References

REFERENCES

Barnes, Sonia (2018). Copula variation in Asturian Spanish and the multidimensionality of stancetaking in interaction. Journal of Sociolinguistics 22:29–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bates, Douglas; Mächler, Martin; Bolker, Ben; & Walker, Steve (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software 67:1–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benor, Sarah Bunin (2001). The learnèd /t/: Phonological variation in Orthodox Jewish English. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 7(3), article 2. Online: https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1462&context=pwpl.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, & Finegan, Edward (1988). Adverbial stance types in English. Discourse Processes 11:1–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas, & Finegan, Edward (1989). Styles of stance in English: Lexical and grammatical marking of evidentiality and affect. Text 9:93–124.Google Scholar
Bolinger, Dwight (1972). That’s that. The Hague: Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Borràs-Comes, Joan; Kiagia, Evangelia; & Prieto, Pilar (2019). Epistemic intonation and epistemic gesture are mutually co-expressive: Empirical results from two intonation-gesture matching tasks. Journal of Pragmatics 150:39–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, Penelope, & Levinson, Stephen C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bucholtz, Mary (2009). From stance to style: Gender, interaction, and indexicality in Mexican immigrant youth slang. In Jaffe, Alexandra (ed.), Stance: Sociolinguistic perspectives, 146–79. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Büring, Daniel (2003). On D-trees, beans, and B-accents. Linguistics and Philosophy 26:511–45.Google Scholar
Campbell-Kibler, Katherine (2010). The sociolinguistic variant as a carrier of social meaning. Language Variation and Change 22:423–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Conrad, Susan, & Biber, Douglas (2000). Adverbial marking of stance in speech and writing. In Hunston, Susan & Thompson, Geoff (eds.), Evaluation in text, 56–73. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Du Bois, John W. (2007). The stance triangle. In Englebretson, Robert (ed.), Stancetaking in discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction, 139–83. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eckert, Penelope (2008). Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12:453–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eckert, Penelope (2019). The individual in the semiotic landscape. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 4(1), article14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elsness, Johan (1984). That or zero? A look at the choice of object clause connective in a corpus of American English. English Studies 65:519–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Finegan, Edward, & Biber, Douglas (1985). That and zero complementizers in Late Modern English: Exploring ARCHER from 1650–1990. In Aarts, Bas & Meyer, Charles F. (eds.), The verb in contemporary English, 241–57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Finegan, Edward, & Biber, Douglas (2001). Register variation and social dialect variation: The register axiom. In Eckert, Penelope & Rickford, John R. (eds.), Style and sociolinguistic variation, 235–67. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Grandi, Nicola, & Körtvélyessy, Lívia (2015). The Edinburgh handbook of evaluative morphology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gunlogson, Christine (2008). A question of commitment. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 22:101–136.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamblin, Charles L. (1973). Questions in Montague English. Foundations of Language 10:41–53.Google Scholar
Heritage, John (2009). Conversation analysis as social theory. In Turner, Bryan S. (ed.), The new Blackwell companion to social theory, 300–320. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heritage, John, & Raymond, Geoffrey T. (2005). The terms of agreement: Indexing epistemic authority and subordination in talk-in-interaction. Social Psychology Quarterly 68:15–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holmes-Elliot, Sophie, & Levon, Erez (2017). The substance of style: Gender, social class and interactional stance in /s/-fronting in southeast England. Linguistics 55:1045–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hunston, Susan (2007). Using a corpus to investigate stance quantitatively and qualitatively. In Englebretson, Robert (ed.), Stancetaking in discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction, 27–48. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Isaacs, Ellen A., & Clark, Herbert H. (1987). References in conversation between experts and novices. Journal of Experimental Psychology 116:26–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jaffe, Alexandra (2009). The sociolinguistics of stance. In Jaffe, Alexandra (ed.), Stance: Sociolinguistic perspectives, 3–28. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kärkkäinen, Elise (2007). The role of I guess in conversational stancetaking. In Englebretson, Robert (ed.), Stancetaking in discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction, 183–219. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kärkkäinen, Elise (2012). I thought it was very interesting: Conversational formats for taking a stance. Journal of Pragmatics 44:2194–2210.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kiesling, Scott F. (2004). Dude. American Speech 79:281–305.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kiesling, Scott F. (2009). Style as stance. In Jaffe, Alexandra (ed.), Stance: Sociolinguistic perspectives, 171–94. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kiesling, Scott F. (2011). Stance in context: Affect, alignment and investment in the analysis of stancetaking. Paper presented at iMean, Bristol, UK.Google Scholar
Kiesling, Scott F. (2016). Stance: Theory and practice in sociolinguistics. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh, ms. Online: https://www.academia.edu/13000752/Stance_and_Stancetaking_Theory_and_Practice_in_Sociolinguistics.Google Scholar
Kiesling, Scott F. (2020). Investment in stancetaking: I mean and just sayin‘. Language Sciences 82:1–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kiesling, Scott F.; Onuffer;, Spencer & Hardware, Alexander (2012). Operationalizing stance as an independent variable. Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 41, Bloomington, IN.Google Scholar
Kiesling, Scott F.; Pavalanathan, Umashanthi; Fitzpatrick, Jim; Han;, Xiaochuang & Eisenstein, Jacob (2018). Interactional stancetaking in online forums. Computational Linguistics 44:683–718.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kroch, Anthony, & Small, Cathy (1978). Grammatical ideology and its effect on speech. In Sankoff, David (ed.), Linguistic variation: Models and methods, 45–55. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Labov, William (2001). Principles of linguistic change, vol. 2: Social factors. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Langlotz, Andreas, & Locher, Miriam A. (2012). Ways of communicating emotional stance in online disagreements. Journal of Pragmatics 44:1591–1606.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levon, Erez (2016). Conflicted selves: Language, religion, and same-sex desire in Israel. In Levon, Erez & Mendes, Ronald Beline (eds.), Language, sexuality, and power: Studies in intersectional linguistics, 215–39. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
López-Couso, María José, & Méndez-Naya, Belén (2012). On the use of as if, as though, and like in present-day English complementation structures. Journal of English Linguistics 40:172–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martin, James R., & White, Peter R. R. (2005). The language of evaluation. New York: Palgrave.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nycz, Jennifer (2018). Stylistic variation among mobile speakers: Using old and new regional variables to construct complex place identity. Language Variation and Change 30:175–202.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ochs, Elinor (1992). Indexing gender. In Duranti, Alessandro & Goodwin, Charles (eds.), Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomenon, 335–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ochs, Elinor (1996). Linguistic resources for socializing humanity. In Gumperz, John J. & Levinson, Stephen C. (eds.), Rethinking linguistic relativity, 407–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ochs, Elinor, & Schieffelin, Bambi (1989). Language has a heart. Text 9:7–25.Google Scholar
Palmer, Frank R. (1979). Modality and the English modals. New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Park, Joseph Sung-Yul (2013). Stance, style, and vocal mimicry. Journal of Pragmatics 53:84–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Podesva, Robert J. (2016). Stance as a window into the language-race connection: Evidence from African American and White speakers in Washington, DC. In Samy Alim, H., Rickford, John R., & Ball, Arnetha F. (eds.), Raciolinguistics: How language shapes our ideas about race, 203–20. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poplack, Shana, & Walker, James A.. (2002). A majority language in minority guise: The future of Quebec English. Paper presented at Canadian Linguistic Association, Dalhousie University, NS, Canada.Google Scholar
Prieto, Pilar, & Borràs-Comes, Joan (2018). Question intonation contours as dynamic epistemic operators. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 36:563–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prieto, Pilar, Borràs-Comes, Joan, & Roseano, Paolo (2021). The encoding of epistemic operations in two Romance languages: Intonation and pragmatic markers. Journal of Pragmatics 172:146–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
R Core Team (2018). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Online: http://www.R-project.org/.Google Scholar
Rissanen, Matti (1991). On the history of that/zero as object clause links in English. In Aijmer, Karin & Altenberg, Bengt (eds.), English corpus linguistics: Studies in honour of Jan Svartvik, 272–89. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Roberts, Craige (2012). Information structure in discourse: Towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics. Semantics & Pragmatics 5(6):1–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rohdenburg, Günter (1998). Clausal complementation and cognitive complexity in English. In Neumann, Fritz-Wilhelm & Schülting, Sabine (eds.), Anglistentag Erfurt: Proceedings of the Conference of the German Association of University Teachers of English, 101–112. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher.Google Scholar
Staum, Laura (2005). When stylistic and social effects fail to converge: A variation study of complementizer choice. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University, ms.Google Scholar
Storms, Gotfrid (1966). That-clauses in Modern English. English Studies 47:249–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A., & Smith, Jennifer (2005). No momentary fancy! The zero complementizer in English dialects. English Language and Linguistics 9:289–309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thompson, Sandra A., & Mulac, Anthony (1991). The discourse conditions for the use of the complementizer that in conversational English. Journal of Pragmatics 15:237–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Torres Cacoullos, Rena, & Walker, James A. (2009). On the persistence of grammar in discourse formulas: A variationist study of that. Linguistics 47:1–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Warner, Anthony (1982). Complementation in Middle English and the methodology of historical syntax: A study of the Wyclifite sermons. London: Croom Helm.Google Scholar