stancedependsp

Stancedependsp is a theoretical term used in linguistics and philosophy of language to describe how the interpretation of a proposition is modulated by the speaker's stance toward it. The concept foregrounds how elements expressing certainty, commitment, doubt, irony, or source credibility alter the perceived content of a statement.

According to the stancedependsp view, certain expressions function as stance markers that anchor propositional content to a speaker attitude, rather than representing the proposition in isolation. These markers interact with contextual dependences such as evidentiality, source of information, and discourse structure to produce a stance-dependent proposition.

Examples include sentences with attitudinal or evidential particles such as "apparently," "surely," "allegedly," and "according to X." For instance, "The project will succeed" carries a different interpretation than "The project will succeed, apparently" under stancedependsp, because the latter encodes speaker stance about evidence.

Applications include analysis of political discourse, science communication, and everyday conversation, where stance-taking affects what is asserted and how strongly it is believed. It also offers a lens for examining irony, sarcasm, and hedging as stance-related phenomena.

Reception and challenges: stancedependsp is a developing idea with limited empirical consensus and is not widely adopted in mainstream linguistics. Critics point to cross-linguistic variation, the risk of category vagueness, and the difficulty of operationalizing stance markers in corpus studies. Proponents argue it provides a unifying account of how disposition and evidence shape meaning.

See also: stance, evidentiality, epistemic modality, discourse marker.