Stance in Different Cultures

The term stance might not be familiar to some people. Stance generally refers to attitude of a speaker or writer that can be seen in his utterances or writings. To some extent, stance is also termed voice or point of view which relates to writers’ position reflected in his writings.

Stance is expressed by the use of stance markers in the form of grammatical features. A specific grammatical feature can show the speaker’s or writer’s position to a topic being discussed; he might be evaluating, appraising or being affective. The grammatical feature includes modals, pronouns, hedges, adverbs or active or passive writing style.

As previously mentioned, stance markers are found in texts. Academic writings were said to be neutral, however, nowadays academic writings are found to be less objective. This is so, as more and more writers use grammatical feature with more straightforward sense, for example, lately, first person pronouns has been used more in research reports. One of the reason for this phenomenon is that academic writing has changed to become more persuasive; writers apply this strategy to engage readers, so that they will be able to send their messages more successfully.

Stance is also related to sociolinguistics aspects, including habit or cultural norms and gender. This is why there are many researches are devoted to stance; the complications behind any feature selection to denote stance is interesting and also important to reveal. Research reports show writing styles of writers of different language backgrounds are different. Russian for example show digressive way of writing, while a report of Semitic language shows more parallelism.  Chinese writers has a less direct way of writing and tend to leave the conclusion to the readers.

Another sociolinguistics aspect to stance is gender. A speaker has a social identity, gender is part of the identity. This identity plays a role while taking a stance. This is demonstrated by a study that compares English essay written by Persian male and female. Based on the research finding, we can see that female writers show more of affective stance by using deontic modals (‘shall’ or ‘hope’), while male writers employ epistemic modals like ‘might’ to convey his evaluation.

Honorific language is a good example of stance making. Misuse of benefactive honorific form in Japanese might disrupt a relationship, this errors often happened to Japanese learners. Javanese is another language with honorific levels. There are three levels of Javanese, the low register that can be used between friends; middle register which is used to express politeness and the high level which should be used when speaking to someone who is older or has a higher social stratum. A Javanese speaker must adhere to applicable norms, including friendliness, truth, respect, speech event, manner and appropriate gesture. Therefore, all the speakers’ intention must be delivered politely; regardless whether the intention is on the opposite direction of the interlocutors’. At this point, selection of lexicon is vital. Mistake in choosing a lexicon might ruin friendliness and respect norms which might cause failure in communication.

The above elaboration illustrated the role of stance in communication, either written or spoken. How stance is expressed and categorised by employing grammatical features as stance markers. Stance expressed a speaker’s or a writer’s attitude. In the context of speaking or writing in a foreign language; a speaker or a writer must comply with the established norms.

References

Hyland, K. (2005). Stance and engagement: a model of interaction in academic discourse. Discourse Studies, 7(2), 173–192. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445605050365

Poedjosoedarmo, Soepomo. Language Propriety in Javanese in Journal of Language and Literature. Vol. 17 No. 1 – April 2017.

Sayah, Leila & Hashemi, Mohammad. (2014). Exploring Stance and Engagement Features in Discourse Analysis Papers. Theory and Practice in Language Studies. 4. 10.4304/tpls.4.3.593-601. Retrieved from: Researchgate.net/publication/276021333_Exploring_Stance_and_Engagement_Features_in_Discourse_Analysis_Papers/citation/download

Takizawa, Kumiko. Stance-taking: JFL Learners and Benefactive Verbs. Dissertations and Theses. Portland State University, Spring 7-18-2018. Retrieved from: https://ejournal.upi.edu/index.php/IJAL/article/view/4915

Xu, Xiaoyu. (2017). An analysis of stance and voice in Applied Linguistics research articles across Mainland Chinese and British cultures. Research Gate. Retrieved from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323735057_An_analysis_of_stance_and_voice_in_Applied_Linguistics_research_articles_across_Mainland_Chinese_and_British_cultures/citation/download