Indiscourse

Indiscourse is a term encountered in some strands of discourse studies to denote the dimension of discourse that concerns the individual speaker’s internal stance, attitudes, and identity as they are enacted in language. In this use, indiscourse refers to how speakers position themselves, express evaluative judgments, and project subjectivity within a communicative act, sometimes beyond the explicit content of the utterance. It is often viewed as the private layer that underlies surface speech or writing and that interacts with social and contextual constraints such as genre, audience, and power relations.

Relation to other concepts: Indiscourse is distinct from broader social discourses and from the linguistic notion of idiolect, yet it overlaps with ideas of stance, voice, and affect. Because of this overlap, some scholars analyze these features under the umbrella of stance-taking or voice rather than treating indiscourse as a separate category. The term’s precise boundaries and definitions vary across studies.

Analytical approaches: Researchers may examine linguistic markers such as hedges, boosters, evaluative adjectives, pronoun choices, mood and modality, and metapragmatic cues to infer indiscourse. Both qualitative discourse analysis and corpus-based methods can be employed to study how individuals signal personal stance and identity within interaction or text.

Applications and critique: Indiscourse has been used to shed light on how people manage credibility, authority, and affiliation in political speech, media discourse, education, and everyday conversation. Critics caution that the concept can be vague or redundant with established notions of stance and voice, highlighting the need for clear definitions and careful methodological treatment.