Pragmatics and stance

This entry examines stance, here defined as those aspects of language that reveal features of individual experience and ways of relating to the world and others. Stance imbues every human (communicative) act, but is also associated with a range of dedicated linguistic expressions, which makes it particularly challenging to delimit the phenomenon in a cross-theoretical and cross-linguistically uncontroversial fashion. This is where pragmatics comes in: an explicit pragmatic theory is required to identify and motivate relevant semantic and notional categorizations in the linguistic analysis of stance.