Stancemarking

Stancemarking is the linguistic practice of encoding a speaker's stance toward a proposition, the discourse, or the interlocutors within spoken or written text. Stance markers signal attitudes such as belief, certainty, doubt, evaluation, or involvement and are used to position the speaker relative to the content. Researchers often distinguish epistemic stance (attitude toward the truth or probability of a proposition), affective or evaluative stance (emotional or value-laden evaluation), and engagement or alignment stance (the degree of alignment with other voices or voices in the discourse).

Stancemarking is realized through multiple resources. Epistemic stance is commonly signaled by modal verbs (may, might, must), adverbs (probably, certainly, evidently), and hedges (perhaps, maybe). Affective or evaluative stance uses attitude adjectives (wonderful, awful), evaluative nouns and adjectives, and amplifiers (indeed, really). Engagement or alignment is conveyed by discourse markers and quotative devices (you know, I mean, as X says) and by evaluative framing that invites or distances the listener. Sentences may also encode stance via pronouns, voice, or syntactic constructions, such as it-clefts or nominalizations.

In research, stancemarking is analyzed within frameworks such as Appraisal Theory and other discourse-pragmatics approaches. It is investigated in corpora of spoken and written language and across genres including conversation, journalism, and online communication. Stancemarking affects perceived credibility, involvement, and interpretive stance, and it can vary by genre, culture, and language. The concept helps explain how speakers negotiate authority, solidarity, and stance in interaction.