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

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)*

Explanations in Sociosyntactic Variation

“…Relative who was a change from above, but it appears to be maintained in English as a stable linguistic variable that marks prestigious associations and social alignment, a fact that offers a possible test of the famed 'sociolinguistic monitor' (see Smith and Holmes-Elliott, this volume). This finding offers a test of the sociolinguistic monitor (Gadanidis et al, 2021) and is consistent with the results from Smith and Holmes-Elliott (Chapter 2 in this volume) where interviews with a local interviewer differed substantially from those of a nonlocal.…”

“…Recent research suggests that stance, a pragmatic factor, is also significantly implicated in complementizer variation, but consistent with the results here, less important than purely linguistic factors(Gadanidis et al, 2021).…”

Gender stereotypes and inclusion in language teaching

“…More generally, think past the first names and representations that come to mind when you ask yourself who to feature in your examples. Sources for diverse names include the database of names compiled by Sanders et al (2020), which provides names for every letter of the English alphabet from different languages and cultures, categorized by gender (feminine, masculine, non-binary), and Kirby Conrod's list of non-binary names. 1 Avoid the use of gendered lexical items such as -man and he where unnecessary.…”