Fighting \u27Stance\u27: The Role of Conversational Positioning in League of Legends (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) Discourse

For researchers, the study of video game players - how they behave, interact, and cooperate in a virtual world – presents a challenge: what methodologies are best suited to approaching these interactions? From a sociolinguistic approach, how do gamers converse, and what do these conversations reveal about epistemic, affective, and political relationships? This study uses John DuBois’ Stance Theory (2007) and recent modifications of it (Kiesling 2022), to analyze data gathered from the popular multiplayer online battle-arena (MOBA) game League of Legends. It focuses on in-game interlocutors’ conversation samples to show their positioning, intersubjective alignment, and evaluation of a constantly changing speech environment. DuBois’ Stance Triangle permits visualization of the stances taken within such chat-room interactions that focus on player comments concerning the game, game-playing, and other gamers (as well as themselves). In the search for stance identity, DuBois’ model specifically seeks to understand the alignment between interlocutors, the evaluation each interlocutor makes of the stance object, and the position each interlocutor takes with regard to that object. This study builds on the work of researchers in stance-based analysis of gaming discourse (Sierra 2016), multimodality (Collister 2012), and language acquisition (Bakos 2018). This triangulation model will be supplemented with other discourse and pragmatic analyses when necessary, to interpret the stance-taking in a rapidly changing online environment filled with stances often likely to be related to ethical positions and displays of commentary on a range of topics, including the meta-game skills and abilities of the players, and extra-game references, and the intersection of these concepts in the construction of attitudinal positioning, stancetaking, and inter-personal dynamics in a common goal-motivated speech environment

News discourse and readers’ comments: expanding the range of citizenship positions?

First Published May 15, 2017.Little attention has been paid to the relation between citizens’ representation in news media and citizen participation in readers’ comments, and to the roles both discourses may play in fostering public engagement in official consultation processes. This article offers a discursive analysis of these questions by focusing on how commenters, through their uses of language in connection with news texts, address the political ordering of news discourse and their positioning therein. Using Critical Discourse Analysis and other interaction-oriented forms of discourse analysis, we examine, first, the topics and the framing of voices in news coverage and, second, the interactional order, stance markers and style features of readers’ comments. Based on data regarding a policy plan on hydroelectric power in Portugal that was submitted to public consultation, we show that citizen positionings emerging from the interaction between news texts and comments change the balance of power within the discussion, but their participatory potential is restrained by traditional citizenship regimes.The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was developed for the project COMPOLIS: 'Communication and Political Engagement with Environmental Issues' and supported by the Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia (Portugal) [grant number EXPL/IVC-COM/1717/2012] through national funds (PIDDAC) and co-funded by the European Fund of Regional Development (FEDER) through COMPETE - Operational Program Competitive Factors (POFC).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Linguistic Marking of Interactionality of Stance in the English Blog Discourse

The present article approaches the notion of stance as an interactive and dynamic discursive phenomenon that is constructed in the process of communication through a sequence of contributions by stance-takers. The linguistic resources (lexical, grammatical and stylistic) which the speakers have at their disposal for articulating their stances have been examined and classified according to their social and pragmatic potential. The material of the research is based on online written messages taken from popular American blogs

Online Conflict Discourse, Identity, and the Social Imagination of Silesian Minority in Poland

This dissertation shows how online discourse drives social change, boundary work, identity performance, and, ultimately, community management (including in-group/out-group membership) by looking at the development and spread of popular nationalism on the internet. As people from outside of the political elites form online communities, they become politically active in online discussions on national (and regional) identity. In doing so, such online communities become communities of practice (Eckert 2006) that discuss recent events and larger issues, take sides, form coalitions, come up with idiosyncratic ways of discussing certain topics and people, and, finally, engage in a range of online behaviors that involve othering, narrativizing, and hateful speech. As a result, nationalism becomes a catalyst for the formation of online communities that emerge and coalesce around political goals, common language, and shared ideological stances. The dissertation examines how public discourse drives social change by looking at nonelite political actors become the ‘movers and shakers’ who radicalize themselves over the course of ongoing online discussions and then advance their ideological agendas by inciting radicalization among others. Finally, this work also analyzes the key role of language in the process of political radicalization in online spaces. The dissertation traces the emergence, coalescence, and maintenance of two such factions in the Western Daily discussion forum (Pol. Dziennik Zachodni, https://dziennikzachodni.pl), as evidenced in language use. Taking a sociolinguistic approach to internet discussions and applying a close, critical discursive reading of unstructured online conversations, the dissertation examines such phenomena as linguistic creativity, othering, narrativizing, and hate speech. All of these phenomena are crucial for identity struggles because it is through them that identities are constructed in the Western Daily forum. Given the context collapse (Marwick and boyd 2011), it is through language that members of the two warring communities can instantaneously identify each other as language becomes an immediate identifier of each participant’s stance toward the topic of the discussion. Not only language conveys intended meanings, but it also encodes pre-existing assumptions that people bring to the conversation, which is why methods of critical discourse analysis are well-positioned to uncover these meanings by focusing on language use

Self-promotion as semiotic behavior : The mediation of personhood in light of Finnish online dating advertisements

The study examines the mediation and evaluation of personhood in light of Finnish online dating advertisements. The main focus is on the performance and interpretation of what has been called self-promotion, or the idealization of the self in relation to others. The study operates with concepts originating from discourse studies and anthropology under the overarching framework of pragmatism-based semiotic anthropology. The online dating advertisement genre is approached as a cultural instrument of personhood and intersubjective interaction in which writers step into a controlled performance of a promotional persona in order to instigate social relations (only) with desirable and ideal others. The primary data consists of 111 Finnish-language online dating advertisements collected from two online dating services in 2007. In addition, a questionnaire was held for a group of university students to elicit examples of actual interpretations. A third set of data consists of cultural metadiscourses that reflect on online dating advertisements as a type of interaction (online dating guidebooks, Internet discussions and articles, a segment of a TV program). Such backstage discourses illuminate the kinds of reflexive metapractices and interpretive assumptions that do not usually come up explicitly in actual advertisement-based interactions. The study shows that stereotypic cultural understandings of self-promotion often focus on specific kinds of evaluative stances and their reliability or appropriateness, whereas many actually occurring phenomena are entirely overlooked. Such biased stereotypes may be one reason for the fact that evaluative stancetaking seems to be an expected but often problematic act in online dating advertisements. The study also illuminates the non-narrative organization of personhood, selfhood, and biography, as taxonomic and hierarchical structures of theoretical representations are one of the most salient textual patterns in the data. More generally, the study draws attention to the importance of the indexical patterning of text-artifacts. Textual patterning at all layers, from macrostructures to orthography, becomes interpreted as signs of personhood contributing, for instance, to particular views of subjectivity, a level of meaning often overlooked in studies of online communication. Moreover, the study stresses the importance of reflexive models and ideologies of interaction. For instance, the nature of online dating advertisements as an intersubjective encounter can be understood in almost entirely opposite ways by different interpreters (e.g., as distant versus intimate, or authentic versus inauthentic ).Tutkimukseni käsittelee kielitieteellisestä ja antropologisesta näkökulmasta sitä, miten suomenkielisissä verkon deitti-ilmoituksissa välittyy käsityksiä henkilöistä. Päähuomion kohteena on itsepromootioksi tai itsensä markkinoinniksi kutsuttu ilmiö eli se, miten itseä idealisoidaan suhteessa toisiin. Deitti-ilmoitusten genreä lähestytään tutkimuksessa kulttuurisena työkaluna, jolla voidaan monin eri tavoin siivilöidä sosiaalista todellisuutta toivottuun ja ei-toivottuun . Tutkimuksessa tarkastellaan erityisesti sitä, millaisia inhimillisiä ominaisuuksia ja arvottavia asenteita erilaiset tekstuaaliset rakenteet vuorovaikutuksessa välittävät ja millaisten kulttuuristen uskomusten ja normien valossa niitä tulkitaan. Tutkimuksen pääaineisto koostuu 111 suomenkielisestä deitti-ilmoituksesta, jotka on kerätty kahdesta eri verkkopalvelusta vuonna 2007. Lisäksi hyödynnetään kyselytutkimusta, jonka vastaajina toimi 27 yliopisto-opiskelijaa. Kyselyn tarkoituksena on tarjota esimerkkejä eri tulkitsijoiden vaihtelevista tulkinnoista. Kolmas aineisto koostuu sellaisesta kulttuurisesta puheesta, jossa käsitellään deitti-ilmoituksia vuorovaikutuksen tyyppinä (mm. deitti-ilmoituksia käsitteleviä opaskirjoja ja artikkeleita, verkkokeskusteluja, ote televisio-ohjelmasta). Tällaiset kulissien takaiset neuvottelut valaisevat sellaisia tulkinnallisia ulottuvuuksia, jotka eivät suoraan tule ilmi varsinaisen deittivuorovaikutuksen aikana. Tutkimus osoittaa, että deitti-ilmoituksia koskevissa stereotyyppisissä käsityksissä huomio keskittyy usein tietynlaisiin eksplisiittisesti arvottaviin ilmauksiin (esim. itsen kehumiseen, toisten kritisoimiseen) ja näiden luotettavuuteen tai soveliaisuuteen mutta monet todellisuudessa ilmenevät keskeiset piirteet jäävät tyystin huomiotta. Tällaiset stereotyypit voivat osaltaan vaikuttaa siihen, että arvottava asennoituminen on ilmoituksissa samaan aikaan sekä odotuksenmukainen että ongelmallinen toiminto. Tutkimus valottaa myös ei-tarinallisia tapoja jäsentää minuutta ja elämäkerrallisia kuvauksia, sillä aineistolle tunnusomaisia ovat hierarkkiset ja taksonomiset listamaiset tekstuaaliset rakenteet. Kaikki tekstien ainekset, makrorakenteista oikeinkirjoitukseen, voivat tulla tulkituksi minuuden merkkeinä eli merkkeinä siitä, kuka ja millainen kirjoittaja henkilönä on ja kuinka kirjoittajan mieli toimii. Vaikka tällaiset tulkinnat usein hajaantuvat jopa täysin vastakkaisiin suuntiin, niitä voidaan selittää eri tulkitsijoiden suuntautumisella erilaisiin merkkeihin tai erilaisiin kulttuurisiin olettamuksiin. Ylipäänsä tutkimuksessa painotetaan sosiaalista vuorovaikutusta ohjaavien kulttuuristen uskomusten ja ideologioiden merkitystä. Eri tulkitsijat voivat esimerkiksi ymmärtää deitti-ilmoitusten luonteen henkilöiden välisenä kohtaamisena lähes täysin vastakkaisin tavoin (esim. etäisenä vs. läheisenä tai luotettavana vs. epäluotettavana )

Cognitive dynamics of stancetaking in risk discourse situation

This article studies the cognitive dynamics of stancetaking in the discourse situations associated with risky behaviour and perilous decisions. The objective of this work is to find out what linguistic and cognitive mechanisms are used by speech participants to conceptualise a discourse situation as a situation of risk, and analyse the ways the stances on the discussed problem (here, the risk of addicting to FACEBOOK, as well as other social networks) are taken by discourse partners under different circumstances and varying communicative conditions. The overall theoretical framework for the study synthesises socio-constructionist and socio-cognitive approaches to discourse analysis of risk and stance. In the post-modernist model, speakers use discourse to construct versions of the world which are variable, functional and consequential. Gilles Fauconnier’s mental spaces theory (1994, 1997) served a methodological tool for re-assembling the ways stances on risks are taken in discourse interaction. Risk-taking has always been an integral part of human behaviour. We are constantly forced to make decisions that lead us towards unknown or uncertain consequences that can be potentially hazardous or even life-threatening. The study shows that the field of risk-taking in everyday life is extremely wide, embracing a diverse range of spheres such as household activities, gambling, sports, finance, medicine, technology or politics. Because risk pervades such a substantial part of our lives, it can be claimed as one of the fundamental concepts of the human conceptual system, thus, cognitive mechanisms of risk conceptualisation, as well as the linguistic ways of discursive stancetaking on risk have been determined, analysed and described in the present research

Multimodal stance-taking in interaction—A systematic literature review

Stance-taking, the public act of positioning oneself toward objects, people or states of affairs, has been studied in many fields of research. Recently, its multimodal realization in interaction has received increasing attention. The current contribution aims to take stock of research on multimodal stance-taking so far, and to present possible avenues for future research. We systematically gathered and appraised 76 articles that investigate the involvement of bodily-visual resources in stance-taking in interaction. The critical appraisal focused on two dimensions of the stance act: form-function relations constituting it, and its dynamic organization in interaction. Regarding form-function relations, we found systematic involvement of specific bodily-visual resources in different stance acts, as well as patterns of multimodal intensification and mitigation of stances. As for its dynamic organization, the review discusses how stance-taking is organized temporally throughout an interaction, with all participants involved carefully negotiating and adapting their stances to one another. Finally, attention is paid to the broader context of stance-taking, including its role in different social and societal contexts. Based on this review, we were able to identify several gaps in the literature, and avenues for future research. We argue that much potential for broadening the scope of research lies in increasing the methodological diversity in approaching multimodal stance-taking, as well as in cross-linguistic studies and varying settings and participant constellations. In conclusion, research into multimodal stance-taking is vibrant, with ample opportunities for future work. This review can be considered as a call to action to move beyond the premise that stance-taking is multimodal, and further investigate this intriguing and fundamental human capacity

From conflict of discourses to military conflict: multimodality of identity construction in Russo-Ukrainian war discourse

This study is an attempt to grasp the discursive nature of Russo-Ukrainian war. The critical discourse analysis of the conflicting ways  Russian and Ukrainian identities are constructed in discourse and by discourse can shed light onto the covert reasons of the unprovoked military aggression Russia has been executing against Ukraine. Our assumptions are based on the idea that identity is a manifold of stances taken by individual as well as collective speakers in various situations of communication. Having epistemic and affective dimensions, stances are inherently interactive, and, thus, have a collective or social nature. Generally speaking, conflictual stances, built in war discourse, express national, political, or sociological worldviews of the stance-takers, reflecting their ideologies, values, and beliefs. The way people see the conflict differs according to what "frames" they choose to see it through. In this study, the frames circumscribing Ukrainian and Russian conflictual identities, as they are built in Ukrainian and Russian media discourse, including social media, have been deconstructed and analyzed. As there are diverse semiotic systems that are used to create, transmit and understand meanings (e.g., verbal and non-verbal, written and oral, visual and audial) various modalities employed in the process of discursive construction of these identities were taken into consideration

Dialogic voices of writers and readers in traveller forums through interpersonality

Este estudio explora el discurso de páginas web y aplica una metodología basada en el diálogo a la interpersonalidad en los foros de viajeros. Este género pertenece al campo de los viajes y el turismo, donde la interacción de autores y lectores se dirige hacia la persuasión a través de opiniones positivas o negativas (aplicación de la teoría del diálogo de Weigand 2010). Se ha utilizado un corpus de conversaciones de foros de viajeros sacada de Trip Advisor en 2012. Esta investigación muestra como las voces del autor y el lector están codificadas en una serie de marcadores metadiscursivos que participan en la caracterización retórica del género en cuestión.This study explores web-based discourse genres and applies a dialogic framework to the study of interpersonality in traveller forums. This genre belongs to the domain of travel and tourism, where the interaction of writers-readers leads towards its ultimate purpose: to persuade others through positive or negative opinions. The theory of Dialogic Action Games (Weigand 2008, 2009, 2010) aids to understand its rationale since these dialogic interactions can be seen as an application of Weigand’s principles (2010), in this case materialized through interpersonal markers (Vande Kopple 1985; Crismore et al. 1993). A corpus of traveller forums (180 threads of conversation) from Trip Advisor was compiled and analyzed. The quantitative and qualitative analyses draw on the notion of voice (White 2003; Hyland 2008), divided into writer’s stance and reader’s engagement. This research shows that they are encoded in a number of interpersonal markers which participate in the genre’s rhetorical characterization

Identity in a Self-styled ‘Paedophile-hunting’ Group: A Linguistic Analysis of Stance in Facebook Group Chats

This article contributes a linguistically informed perspective to a growing body of work describing the nature and practices of self-styled ‘paedophile-hunting’ groups. Their reliance on publicly exposing suspected child predators in live-streamed confrontations poses significant moral and practical challenges for UK law enforcement, even if their evidence has proved significant in the conviction of sex offenders. In this article, we extend extant insight through the linguistic analysis of 18 months of private online group chat data from one of the UK’s most prolific hunting teams. Specifically, we explore the group’s collective linguistic identity performance through a corpus-assisted analysis of stance. Our analysis foregrounds the significance of social bonding and community identity and nuances current understanding of hunters’ negative view of the police. It also suggests that the entertainment value of the detective work involved in hunting may be more significant than the emphasis on hunters’ self-proclaimed moral superiority in extant work suggests