Colloquium: Scott Kiesling "Investment in stancetaking: just sayin' and I mean"

As stance and stancetaking have become more central to analyses that account for patterns of language use, the need for a theoretical underpinning for stancetaking analyses has become more urgent, especially as linguists and other researchers begin to try to attempt quantitative as well as qualitative analyses of stancetaking in conversation. This paper briefly articulates and applies such a theory, building on the advances of Du Bois (2007). I define stance as the relationship of an animator (in Goffman’s 1981 terms) to a created figure in talk, the talk in the utterance, and the interlocutors in the speech event. I argue that each utterance is composed of three dimensions of stancetaking that are always present and represent one of these relationships: evaluation, investment, and alignment, respectively.

These dimensions can be motivated more completely by appealing to Jakobson’s (1957/1971) notions of speech event and narrated event (see also Wortham and Reyes 2015, Kockelman 2004). In this view, a lower investment stance marks a mismatch between the narrated and speech events. In essence, investment could be thought of as something akin to the strength of an assertion, claim, or speech act, in which the animator is more responsible for it. Alignment shows a greater match between narrated events from different animators and contribution to the shared project of interaction (aka ‘cooperation’).

In order to demonstrate these dimensions, I show how this stancetaking model best explains the use of two English phrasal discourse markers: just sayin(g) and I mean. Just is a versatile lexical item that in general works as a downtowner, and by itself can be used to reduce what it modifies on a scale, often presupposing that the modified item is not high on some scale. So I’m just sayin’ suggests that the act of saying is lower on some scale than some other act of uttering, such as insisting or arguing. This downgrading of the verb say is a reflexive distancing of the animator from the principal. Put another way, it separates the narrated event and the speech event. The syntactically integrated version of this phrase has changed to a standalone discourse marker that appears utterance-finally, which in interaction tends to be a way of leveling criticism without taking responsibility for the critical force of the utterance. I show how this use is used for this function in twitter posts for this function.

I mean is shown by Maynard (2013) to defend complaints against criticism, and appear in similar sequences as self-repairs. In terms of stancetaking, this view suggests that I mean functions to signal aspects of investment and alignment: In terms of investment, the I mean prefaced utterance invests the speaker further in the complaint, even while they might be revising the complaint. In alignment, it modulates a potential disalignment with the animator of the previous turn. I expand this view to investigate how I mean is used as a complete turn, and in other contexts. In these contexts I mean tends to lose its connection with complaint, but retain its stancetaking functions for investment and alignment. Data for this phrase comes from both Twitter posts and a conversation among eight women, each recorded on a separate track.

References
Du Bois, John (2007). The stance triangle. In R. Englebretson (Ed.), Stancetaking in discourse, pp. 139–182. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Goffman, Erving (1981). Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Jakobson, Roman (1957/1971). Shifters, verbal categories, and the Russian verb. In Roman Jakobson, Selected Writings, vol. 2, pp. 130-147. The Hague: Mouton.

Kockelman, P. (2004). Stance and Subjectivity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 14(2), 127–150.

Maynard, Douglas. 2013. Defensive mechanisms: I-mean-prefaced utterances in complaint and other conversational sequences. In Hayashi, Makoto, Raymond, Geoffrey, and Sidnell, Jack, eds. Conversational Repair and Human Understanding. West Nyack, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.

Wortham, Stanton and Angela Reyes (2015). Discourse Analysis Beyond the Speech Event. New York: Routledge.