John W. Du Bois (2007), in Robert Englebretson (ed.), Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction, Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 164, John Benjamins, pp. 139–182 — DOI-10.1075/pbns.164.07du
Key takeaways
Read in full (NOTE-590).
- One act, three aspects. Evaluation (that’s horrible), positioning (I’m glad, I know) and alignment (I agree) are not stance types but facets of every stance act. The definition: “a public act by a social actor, achieved dialogically through overt communicative means, of simultaneously evaluating objects, positioning subjects (self and others), and aligning with other subjects, with respect to any salient dimension of the sociocultural field.”
- The triangle. Nodes: first subject, second subject, shared stance object. Two sides are evaluative vectors from each subject to the object; the third is alignment between the subjects; positioning reflects back on each subject. Knowing part of the triangle lets participants infer the rest: agreeing implies the prior evaluation, repeating an evaluation implies convergence.
- No stance stands alone. “I’m glad”, “I know” and “I agree” are grammatically complete and incomplete as stances; their object and the stance they answer usually come from a co-participant’s earlier turn, sometimes dozens of lines back. “Subjectivity takes an object.”
- Marking the follow. When a second stance resonates with a first (I don’t like those / I don’t either), the follow must carry too or either and the lead cannot; differences inside a parallel follow (a rising Yeah?, want for love) calibrate alignment, which is scalar, convergent or divergent by degrees.
- Evidence. Qualitative analysis of short excerpts from the Santa Barbara and Longman spoken corpora; the too/either claim rests on a separate study (Du Bois 2004) whose figures are not given.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-09 at the owner’s request, as one of the works in the reference list of the owner’s working manuscript (October 2026) that the record did not yet hold. See the curation entry of that day. Read the same day.
As first filed, this note described the triangle as one subject evaluating an object and thereby aligning “or disaligning” with another. The chapter gives the triangle two evaluative sides and one alignment side, with positioning reflexive at each subject, and treats alignment as a scale from convergent to divergent rather than a binary.
The chapter sets aside, in its note 13, the case where the stance subject is not the speaker, and cites Goffman’s Forms of Talk (LIT-780) for it; the two filings meet there. No THEORY is filed from it; the NOTE gives a candidate on the obligatory marking of stance follows.