The poetics of stance: Text-metricality, epistemicity, interaction

Abstract

This article examines the text-metrical (“poetic”) organization of epistemic stance-taking in discourse, focusing on epistemic stance in a form of argumentation, Tibetan Buddhist ‘debate’ (rtsod pa) at Sera Monastery in India. Emergent text-metrical structures in discourse are shown to reflexively map utterance-level propositional stance into larger-scale, fractionally congruent models of interactional stance. In charting the movement from epistemic stance to interactional stance by way of poetic structure, the article argues for and clarifies the place of poetics in the study of stance.

10. Discourse Markers

“…Thus, Lempert (2008) examines the poetic organization of epistemic stance as a form of argumentation in Tibetan Buddhist face-to-face 'debates'. Thus, Lempert (2008) examines the poetic organization of epistemic stance as a form of argumentation in Tibetan Buddhist face-to-face 'debates'.…”

Exclusionary intimacies: Racialized language in Veneto, Northern Italy

“…Alignment and disalignment have been recently explored through the concept of stance, which has been defined by Du Bois (2007) as a public act by a social actor, achieved dialogically through overt communicative means (language, gesture, and other symbolic forms), through which social actors simultaneously evaluate objects, position subjects (themselves and others), and align with other subjects, with respect to any salient dimension of the sociocultural field. (Du Bois, 2007: 163) The fact that stance is achieved "dialogically" through alignments and disalignments has recently made it a useful analytical tool for linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists both in research on face-to-face interaction (Lempert, 2008;Jaffe, 2009Jaffe, , 2015Kiesling, 2011;Pagliai, 2011) and in studies focused on the digital world such as the blogosphere (Jaffe and Walton, 2011) or YouTube (Chun and Walters, 2011;Rymes, 2012;Chun, 2013Chun, , 2016Koven and Simões Marques, 2015;Mendoza-Denton, 2016). Stancetaking also has the potential to be a valuable tool to study the subtle moves interactants make to include or exclude speech participants in settings where migrants are present or topics around migration are brought up.…”

Non-alignment in footing, intentionality and dissent in talk about immigrants in Italy

“…Generally, Stivers appears to be more concerned with the participants' distinction between affiliation and alignment (2008, p. 36), while my focus is on distinguishing different ways in which non-alignment is deployed and interpreted. 6 For alternative views on stance, see also Goodwin (1998Goodwin ( , 2006, Kiesling (2005), Johnstone (2009), Lempert (2008Lempert ( , 2009), Ochs and Schieffelin (1989). 7 However, Du Bois focuses mostly on agreement (all but one of his examples in the article are of agreement) and he uses the words ''alignment'' and ''agreement'' interchangeably.…”