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This systematic literature review enhances paradigmatic/metaphysic analyses by examining how value-based commitments, intellectual personae, and stances impact the diversity, relevance, and consideration of ethics in gender research published by the top-tier marketing journals in the past 30 years. Theoretical contributions (1) explain how commitments to research values and practices constitute personae and particular stances toward research, (2) attribute value commitments to quantitative/positivist as well as qualitative/neohumanist research, and (3) implicate stances that favor particular theories and procedures and in turn enable the hierarchical development of gender research and its marginalization in the field. Recommendations elaborate the analytic, reflexive, and administrative training and research activities that will foster and reward more relevant, accurate, and ethical research on gender in the marketing academy and in industry. This work is of interest to persons dealing with gender identities, communities, and social issues, those working for greater gender representation and participation in firms and civic organizations, and those concerned with leveraging better marketing research for a better world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the use of co-enactment for stance-taking in Flemish Sign Language (VGT) interactions. Enactment, i.e., a signer or speaker combining "bodily movements, postures and eye gaze to 'construct' actions and dialogue in order to 'show' characters, events and points of view" (Hodge and Ferrara, 2014, p. 373) serves as a resource not only for depicting characters and events but also for expressing the signer's stance on these characters and events. Furthermore, through enactment, signers invite their interlocutors to adopt their perspective on the events depicted, thus influencing mutual understanding and involvement. While previous research has extensively explored formal aspects of individual enactments, co-enactments, i.e. sequences in which multiple participants jointly enact the same event, are largely unexplored in signed interactions. The present study identifies three functions of co-enactments, as evidenced in the data: grounding, joint stance-taking, and joint fantasizing. Furthermore, I examine the sequential unfolding of these enactments, as well as their design, including body partitioning, through which signers simultaneously manage the discourse and enact characters. The results demonstrate that, in contrast to traditional views that depict enactments as solitary activities, co-enactments involve both signers in jointly shaping and evaluating stance objects, thereby facilitating intersubjective conceptualizations of events and stance alignment. • Signers engage in collaboratively shaping and reshaping an enacted character or event. • Co-enactments play a role in grounding and joint stance taking. • Body partitioning and gaze shifts help signers manage discourse and enact characters. • Studying dialogic data reveals the collaborative nature of enactments in VGT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes American high school students hedging incorrect responses to teacher-initiated questions in IRE (Initiation-Response-Evaluation) format using conditional language and hypotheticals in ways that facilitate an affiliative stance between students and their teacher. Scholarship on hedging details its use to approximate responses as a shield against doubt and criticism or as collaborative communication, whereas stance is a grammatically encompassed expression of attitudes related to the content of a message. This study brings together theories of stance, hedging, and conditional language use to outline how errors can be a student-initiated pedagogical tool to deepen explanations and engagement. To broaden understanding of the form and function of both incorrect answers and hedging as a structure expanding traditional IRE turntaking for managing classroom discourse, this article outlines seven examples total where students hedge what they know to be incorrect answers drawn from recordings made in forty, fifty-minute high school level Latin lessons over the 2019–2020 academic year. This study presents a model and impacts of students creatively reconfiguring evaluative responses along with their teacher during instruction through hedging incorrect information in conditional, and sometimes hypothetical, formats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the continuous development of the Internet, people widely use social media platforms such as Weibo and Twitter, resulting in a huge amount of user generated content every day. It is important to analyze the user s attitude based on the user generated content for hot/focused topics as it can help relevant stakeholders make informed decisions. Therefore, the goal of the stance detection task is to determine the user s stance (favor/against/neutral) on the target according to the specified target and the given content. This paper described the stance detection tasks, applications, related data resources and related works. For stance detection tasks, in addition to the previous single/multiple/cross target stance detection tasks, this paper also organized the works related to zero/small sample stance detection. For data resources, this paper gave a detailed introduction to the data resources published in recent years. For stance detection methods, in addition to traditional machine learning methods, neural networks and other methods, this paper also sorted out the methods based on the pre training model. Finally, it summarized the development status of stance detection, and looked forward to the possible research hotspots in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the under-researched area of discursive tactics employed in terrorist threat texts that exploit moral values to constantly justify violence, fostering a 'discourse of justification', disaffiliation and conflict. Employing a discursive pragmatic analysis, it delves into the tactics of violent extremists associated with jihadism and far-right ideologies. Utilising the Appraisal framework and the 'moral disaffiliation' strategy, the study uncovers verbal practices shaping a dynamic of justification. Findings reveal threateners' involvement in regulatory discursive functions – manipulation, deontic-retaliation, and boulomaic effect – and practices of ideologically positioning functions – discrediting, blaming, denying and (de)legitimating. The analysis highlights the construction of negative victim individuals and societies while praising the threatener/in-group, anchored predominantly in values of propriety, capacity, valuation and veracity, as the primary dynamic of threatener-victim disalignment. This study contributes insights into threatener profiling, motivations of violence and future research on threat-genre rhetorical structure analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writing qualitatively is an immersive experience divergent to other forms of research writing. It is an active construction of reality characterized by integration of the socio-cultural context and in-depth analysis of data viewed through the lens of the writer's own experience of the phenomenon. However, these characteristics prove challenging and qualitative researchers are often at a loss on how to document their findings. Most studies provide a broad sweep of qualitative writing with few explicit examples in practice which further confounds researchers. Consequently, researchers find qualitative writing exacting and intimidating and tend to present their findings objectively with either scarce or excessive reference to the research paradigm, thwarting the full transformative potential of qualitative research. Drawing on my experience as an interpretive phenomenologist, I present the writing cul-de-sacs and alleys I navigated to illustrate my becoming as a qualitative writer. Specifically, I highlight three distinct strategies to write it right, qualitatively. To maximize findings, the writing style should conceptually align with the research philosophy. Textual cohesion and a multi-dimensional view of social reality can be generated through a mixed-genre writing approach. Finally, making the "I" meaningful by incorporating the researcher's experiences into the text affords a deepened understanding of the phenomenon. Tenaciously navigating cul-de-sacs in writing and finding solutions to exit no through roads, and walking those shadowy alleys of theoretical constraints, stylistic impositions, and tight word space endow a concrete visibility to the otherwise blurry aspects of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recently resurged Yoruba Nation (YN, henceforth) agitation joins some socio-political movements, social protests, and resistance group discourse in Nigeria that continue to gain traction in (critical) discourse studies. Guided by the theoretical paradigms of van Leeuwen's representational strategies and Martin and White's appraisal framework, 24 representative posts out of a thousand posts culled from Nairaland, Gistmania, and Naijaloaded generated between October 2020 and October 2021 were purposively selected and subjected to discourse analysis. Two levels of construction were realised: YN agitators and YN agitation. YN agitators were associated with four constructions: cowards, violence mongers, terrorists, and organised strategists. YN agitation was associated with three constructions: a threat to sovereignty and national unity, and emancipation from oppression. Negative labels manifested more than positives. The dominant negative constructs of the YN agitation manifested implicitly and explicitly through labelling, negative comparison, appeal to sentiments, expression of detest, and flaming, while the positive constructs manifested through encomium and appeal to ethnic benefit. Online participants do not only project and spread their ideological stances on the YN agitation; they also make efforts to suppress antithetical stances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stance-taking in academic writing is now a well-established topic of interest in English language research, with explorations across a range of theoretical frameworks including metadiscourse and systemic functional linguistics (SFL). This includes studies investigating second language (L2) stance-taking, particularly those comparing stance features deployed by L1 and L2 English writers. However, studies investigating stance-taking using the APPRAISAL framework for evaluative discursive language across L1 and L2 production are relatively rare. Incorporating the APPRAISAL framework into research on stance-taking enhances our comprehension of evaluative language in academic writing, especially when it comes to cross-linguistic contexts. It also provides useful advantages for language assessment and instruction. In this learner corpus-assisted discourse study, APPRAISAL was used to determine how L1 English speakers and L2 English learners from L1 Vietnamese backgrounds expressed attitudes through their written texts. We also investigate the relationship between use of APPRAISAL resources and expert raters’ perceptions of written stance via a stance rubric. Findings show L2 English students are more explicit in argumentative writing than L1 English writers, despite fewer APPRAISAL choices in L2 texts. Besides, while high-rated texts were associated with more judgemental evaluation and invocation, more personal feelings were expressed in low-rated texts. These findings have implications for the instruction of L2 writers in conveying attitudinal meanings in text, as well as for raters tasked with assessing L2 academic essays for stance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes the online discussions surrounding the dubbing of Disney movies into two Arabic varieties: Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA). The objective is to uncover the language ideologies and attitudes taken by Disney Facebook commenters and verbal-guise technique (VGT) participants online. Dubbing Disney movies into these two varieties has sparked numerous debates on social media, particularly on Facebook. The study employed stance-taking to analyze the metalinguistic comments made by Facebook users about the use of these two Arabic varieties in the context of Disney. A VGT experiment was conducted on Disney excerpts to complement the results. The findings provided valuable insights into how Arab social media users' stances are influenced by their ideologies and attitudes. Lastly, the VGT experiment provided another perspective on how Arabs evaluate MSA and ECA in the context of Disney movies and how they express their indirect language attitudes. The findings showed the differences in language attitudes between Maghreb, Mashreq, and Arab Peninsula countries. The language attitudes of Mashreq and Peninsula countries were closer to each other than to those of the Maghreb countries. Moreover, ECA competes with MSA in prestige and pleasantness. MSA is seen as the thread that connects the Arab World and is admired for its connection with the Arab heritage, religion, and education. However, it is less favored for its rigidity, unintelligibility, and unnaturalness as a spoken variety. Finally, ECA is favored for its simplicity, humor, closeness, familiarity, intimacy, naturalness, and entertainment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writing argumentative correspondences is an art requiring linguistic and rhetorical skills to bring forth the ultimate effect of persuading the audience. However, instruction of this critical language art has been underrepresented in Thai tertiary educational contexts. This study is based on an interventional experiment of teaching an ESP-Science course to 40 students majoring in science, with a strong emphasis on linguistic devices for academic interaction, consisting of stance and engagement marking, as elaborated in Hyland (2005a, 2005b). The interventional experiment made use of the 240 correspondences taken from the scientific journal Nature with the duration of 30 hours over a 10-week period. This study reports the findings from a comparison of the students’ writing before and after the intervention and a comparison of the students’ post-experiment writing and the experts’ writing. The analysis is based on content analysis, inter-rater assessment, and descriptive statistics, and shows that a meaningful level of progress has been obtained as a result of the intervention. The progress is evident in not only that students’ post-experiment writing exceeds in quality their pre-experiment writing, but also that students’ post-experiment writing has become similar to the expert writing to a great extent, with respect, in particular, to the strategic patterns of stance and engagement marking. The success of a relatively short intervention, i.e., 10 weeks, calls for implementation of courses using authentic correspondences in ESP-Science classes, or more broadly, in ESP courses in diverse disciplines (237/250). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative research draws on language and social interaction (LSI) approaches to consider how speech culture shapes the practice of deliberation in a country presumed to be a challenging environment for deliberative practices: Israel. Our analysis examines structured deliberative forums conducted by communication students in Israel, to demonstrate how participants reference, use, and orient to both deliberative democracy discourse and Israeli speech culture in ways that enable them to overcome cultural challenges to doing deliberation. We found that participants utilize metadiscourse to take stances that frame cultural challenges of deliberation, negotiate the tensions between deliberative principles and local speech culture, and creatively integrate local speech norms with deliberation. This research contributes to LSI and Political Communication scholarship, by enhancing practical theory of deliberative democracy. The explication of the role of metadiscourse reframes the relationship between culture and deliberation thereby providing new directions for scholars, practitioners, and educators of deliberative democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study contributes to recent renewed interest in the social construction of folk linguistic knowledge and directs its focus to a multilingual workplace. The article reports on an in-depth sociolinguistic investigation in a European institution in Luxembourg. Data were collected in 2020–2021 with trainees and permanent staff in a terminology and communication unit. The data collection triangulated qualitative techniques of longitudinal interviewing, reflective drawing, writing reflection and observation. Analysis of participants' stances uncovered a varying understanding of what multilingualism means in the workplace, how it changes and to what effect. During reflective participation, the trainees heightened their sociopragmatic awareness of diversity in the meaning-making process. Moreover, they ceased to construct their personal multilingualism as proof of professional competence and started to see it as the basis of their own well-being, personal self-realisation and growth. As such, they re-coupled the social and linguistic aspect of their language use and aligned their stances with the permanent staff. This study aims to inspire more innovative approaches with a potential direct effect in multilingual workplaces, especially in those welcoming workers from monolingual or otherwise homogeneous social environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much scholarship across the humanities and social sciences seek to shed light on the intersection of far-right politics and social media platforms. Yet, scholars tend to focus on racist actors and the ideological underpinnings of platform policies while the contingencies that shape the experiences of content reviewers who make decisions about racist content remain underexamined. This article fills this gap by exploring such contingencies from a linguistic anthropological perspective. Drawing on Facebook moderators' stories, I illustrate the factors adjacent to, and beyond, ideology that animate the adjudication of racist hate speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has argued that consecutive interpreters constitute laminated speakers in the sense that they engage with different kinds of footing at once, representing another's point of view through their words in another language. These multiple roles also play out in their gesturing, as they sometimes indicate deictically who is the source of the ideas and stances they are expressing (the principal). Simultaneous interpreters, though, often work in an interpreting booth; they are often not seen by the audience, yet many of them gesture, sometimes frequently. How are simultaneous interpreters using gesture in relation to stance-taking and footing? We consider the case of simultaneous interpreters rendering popular science lectures between (both to and from) Russian (their L1) and either English or German (their L2). Though only hearing the audio of the lectures, the interpreters produced many gestures, which were analyzed for their function. Some representational and deictic gestures appeared to clearly involve the interpreter as the principal (writing numbers with one's finger to help remember them or pointing to two places on the desk to keep track of two different quantities mentioned). Other representational and deictic gestures are ambiguous as to whether they are enacting what the interpreter may have imagined what the lecturer did or whether they arose out of the interpreter's own thinking for speaking (e.g., tracing the form of a bird being mentioned or pointing to an empty space when the lecturer was referring to a graph). Pragmatic gestures, showing one's stance toward the topic of the talk, were the most ambiguous as to the footing, reflecting how the interpreter may be engaged in fictive interaction with their imagined audience. Self-adapters, however, more clearly involve the interpreter as the principal, as such actions are known to support cognitive focussing and self-soothing. In sum, we see varying degrees of clarity as to whose stance and principal footing simultaneous interpreters are expressing bodily as laminated speakers. The variable ambiguity can be attributed to the nature of gesture as a semiotic system, the functions of which are more often dependent on co-occurring speech than vice versa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Stroke is a leading cause of disability, especially due to an increased fall risk and postural instability. The objective of this study was to analyze the impact of motor impairment in the hemiparetic UE on static balance in standing, in subject with chronic stroke. Methods: Seventy adults with chronic stroke, capable of independent standing and walking, participated in this cross-sectional study. The exclusion criteria included vestibular, cerebellar, or posterior cord lesions. The participants were classified based on their UE impairment using the Fugl-Meyer Assessment of Motor Recovery after Stroke (FMA-UE). A posturographic evaluation (mCTSIB) was performed in the standing position to analyze the center of pressure (COP) displacement in the mediolateral (ML) and anteroposterior (AP) axes and its mean speed with eyes open (OE) and closed (EC) on stable and unstable surfaces. Results: A strong and significant correlation (r = −0.53; p < 0.001) was observed between the mediolateral (ML) center of pressure (COP) oscillation and the FMA-UE, which was particularly strong with eyes closed [r(EO) = 0.5; r(EC) = 0.54]. The results of the multiple linear regression analysis indicated that the ML oscillation is influenced significantly by the FMA-Motor, and specifically by the sections on UE, wrist, coordination/speed, and sensation. Conclusions: The hemiparetic UE motor capacity is strongly related to the ML COP oscillation during standing in individuals with chronic stroke, with a lower motor capacity associated with a greater instability. Understanding these relationships underpins the interventions to improve balance and reduce falls in people who have had a stroke. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article contributes to research on evaluation by addressing two complementary objectives: first, we present a protocol for the identification and annotation of evaluation in English discourse and, second, we show the results of the implementation of the protocol in the annotation of evaluation in a sample of a corpus of four genres. We first describe the protocol by discussing the theoretical and methodological grounding of the annotation scheme, the criteria, the categories, the steps for the implementation of the protocol and an illustrative example of the application of the protocol to a short extract. We subsequently provide the preliminary results of a pilot study with the frequency of evaluative expressions across the four genres. Results show that while adjectives and non-metaphoric evaluative expressions are overall more frequent, there are differences regarding the preference for positive or negative value and regarding the frequency of function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explains the processes involved in knowledge sharing and support giving in an open FB forum dedicated to endometriosis. It builds on the existing understanding of experiential knowledge, as well as adopts Jovchelovitch's (2007) perspective on knowledge diversity and representation which views knowledge construction as an intersubjective process. The analysis looks at the what, the who, and the how of the community in question, focusing in particular on three areas: identity work (self- and other-categorisation); perspective sharing and recognition by "significant others"; and epistemic self-other positioning. The analysis determines the most common strategies of categorisation, identifies ways of constructing shared understanding, as well as reveals that the participants' personal truths are based primarily on their embodied experience and hearsay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the methodology of conversation analysis, this study considers excerpts from Japanese spontaneous conversation in which the intensity of evaluation is modified through self-repair operations. It demonstrates that the modification is utilised as an interactional resource. The analysis reveals that the intensity of evaluation is modified to achieve two interactional outcomes: to disambiguate or amplify the speaker's evaluative stance toward the referent and to display the speaker's orientation to the lack of direct epistemic access or strong commitment to the position. The findings are discussed to explore the possibility that the public process of modifying the intensity of evaluation may itself be an interactional resource with which to display the speaker's dual orientations. The paper further considers the possible crosslinguistic relevance of the findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We evaluated 18 methods capable of identifying initial contact (IC) and terminal contact (TC) gait events during human running using data from a single wearable sensor on the shank or sacrum. We adapted or created code to automatically execute each method, then applied it to identify gait events from 74 runners across different foot strike angles, surfaces, and speeds. To quantify error, estimated gait events were compared to ground truth events from a time-synchronized force plate. Based on our findings, to identify gait events with a wearable on the shank, we recommend the Purcell or Fadillioglu method for IC (biases +17.4 and -24.3 ms; LOAs -96.8 to +131.6 and -137.0 to +88.4 ms) and the Purcell method for TC (bias +3.5 ms; LOAs -143.9 to +150.9 ms). To identify gait events with a wearable on the sacrum, we recommend the Auvinet or Reenalda method for IC (biases -30.4 and +29.0 ms; LOAs -149.2 to +88.5 and -83.3 to +141.3 ms) and the Auvinet method for TC (bias -2.8 ms; LOAs -152.7 to +147.2 ms). Finally, to identify the foot in contact with the ground when using a wearable on the sacrum, we recommend the Lee method (81.9% accuracy).

The present study explored authorial presence in the abstracts across three purpose-built discipline-specific corpora of RAs in major but relatively less represented disciplines in corpus studies: Civil Engineering (CE), Political Sciences (PS) and Veterinary Medicine (VM). In particular, due to less attention having been paid to these fields, we examined explicit authorial references with a functional perspective in a corpus of abstracts totaling over one million words. To this end, we first conducted a preliminary search for explicit third-person plural author references in the corpora and manually analysed a total of over 6,000 instances to check if they were all markers signaling an authorial presence in the text. Following this, the second manual analyses concentrated on categorizing the rhetorical functions of self-mentions based on Xia's (2018) framework. The preliminary findings showed that the frequency of "we"-based authorial references in PS outweighed that in the other disciplines (PS: 722.13; CE: 636.81; VM: 481.30 per 100,000 words). Regarding the density of authorial references, we found that each discipline favored being more visible with divergent authorial roles in their abstracts. For example, PS were more rhetorically present in their abstracts by "proposing a theory or approach" whereas CE and VM authors used fewer self-mentions to mark their presence frequently with this rhetorical device. With respect to the functional analyses of the self-mentions of "we", all three disciplines displayed more low-stakes functions such as "recount experimental procedure and methodology". We focused on the significance of cross-disciplinary and functional analysis in the study in order to contribute to designing activities in EAP for each discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expanding on classic theories of stancetaking and theorizing digital activism as nexus analysis, I examine how Omani Arab citizens used discourse and images to canalize a failed food boycott campaign on Twitter (X) into a united negative stance against alleged corruption. I highlight the role of multimodality, impoliteness, indirectness, intertextual references, participation framework and Arabic cultural practices in creating a multi-layered, accreted stance with manifold implicit functions (e.g., defining Omani identity, lamenting and signalling dissent). I argue for the need to widen the scope and level of analysis of stance acts to include interplays between texts, emoji, actions and images. I also highlight the role that stance can perform in expressing dissent and managing cultural face in the understudied Arabic context. I, therefore, demonstrate the multidimensionality of stance acts made visible by social media affordances and user creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the ways in which apology functions as a stance act at public speech events. Rather than focusing on speakers' intentions, in this study I pay attention to indexical meanings associated with apologies in a specific context. The study primarily analyses apology sequences that involve code-switching, which were drawn from ethnographic data gathered in a Korean university where English has been adopted as its official language (EOL). Data analysis shows that the use of apology allows speakers to take a stance towards their language choice and the institutional language policy. Both apology and speakers' metalinguistic articulations prior to code-switching reflect and reinforce the two language ideologies: (1) the language policy is intended to serve for international members of the university, and (2), Korean can be used when needed. A closer look at the way in which apology is used in specific contexts suggests that speakers' main purpose of apology is self-presentation in a public event. Apology functions to index speaker's defiance of an institution's language policy while avoiding their responsibility for the action. The sociolinguistic concept of stance allows us to better understand speakers' positioning with respect to norms and expectations informed by institutional language policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Covid‐19 was the greatest public health crisis of a century, accounting for millions of deaths and initiating an urgent surge of published biomedical research. In this climate of social anxiety, researchers scrambled to publicize their work and achieve a medical breakthrough. The use of journal highlights, a brief bullet pointed list summarising the novel results of a study, is an important tool in this promotional endeavour. In this study we focus on the stance taken by authors in this genre by examining 300 highlights dealing with the virus and comparing them with 300 from articles in the same 16 journals on other issues. Our results show significantly greater use of stance markers in the Covid highlights with hedges, boosters and self‐mention particularly marked. Our study offers both a description of stance in highlights and an understanding of the potential impact of the intense, high‐stakes competition generated by the pandemic in biomedical publishing. We believe this offers a valuable contribution to the literature on stance, academic discourse and rhetorical persuasion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While previous research has extensively explored the ways writers project themselves into discourse and engage with readers across various written genres, limited attention has been given to understanding how university lecturers express their stance, i.e., expression of positioning and commitment towards propositions and students. To address this gap, this study proposes a functional framework for analyzing stance features in academic lectures using 160 lecture transcripts from four broad disciplinary divisions: arts and humanities, social sciences, physical sciences, and medical sciences. The analysis focuses on the extent and manner in which lecturers position themselves in discourse to steer students towards their intended interpretations. The findings indicate that lecturers, regardless of their disciplinary background, express their stance through seven distinct functions, including evaluating their level of commitment, posing questions, interacting with the audience, indicating obligations, emphasizing topics, initiating discourse, and previewing exam-related content. The findings have significant pedagogical implications, especially for educators and EAP practitioners seeking to improve lecture comprehension and engagement among students. Understanding how lecturers use language to interact with students and structure academic discourse can empower teachers to adopt similar stances for guiding students in engaging with course materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although research into multimodal stance-taking has gained momentum over the past years, the multimodal construction of so-called stacked stances has not yet received systematic attention in the literature. Mocking enactments are a prime example of such complex social actions as they are layered both interactionally and stance-related, and they rely significantly on the use of bodily visual resources, depicting rather than describing events and stances. Using Du Bois’ Stance Triangle as a framework, this study investigates mocking enactments as a case study to unravel the multimodal aspects of layered stance expressions. Drawing on three data sets—music instruction in Dutch, German, and English, spontaneous face-to-face interactions among friends in Dutch, and narrations on past events in Flemish Sign Language (VGT)—this study provides a qualitative exploration of mocking enactments across different communicative settings, languages, and modalities. The study achieves three main objectives: (1) illuminating how enactments are used for mocking, (2) identifying the layers of stance-taking at play, and (3) examining the multimodal construction of mocking enactments. Our analysis reveals various different uses of enactments for mocking. Aside from enacting the target of the mockery, participants can include other characters and viewpoints, highlighting the breadth of the phenomenon under scrutiny. Second, we uncover the layered construction of stance on all axes of the Stance Triangle (evaluation, positioning, and alignment). Third, we find that mocking enactments are embedded in highly evaluative contexts, indexed by the use of bodily visual resources. Interestingly, not all mocking enactments include a multimodally exaggerated depiction, but instead, some merely allude to an absurd hypothetical scenario. Our findings contribute to the growing body of literature on multimodal stance-taking, by showing how a nuanced interpretation of the Stance Triangle can offer a useful framework for analyzing layered stance acts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examines the politicians' and experts' use of the two evidential markers I think and I know for authority and solidarity in UK government Covid briefings based on a corpus-assisted analysis. It not only analyses their evidential constructions, but also explicates their discursive functions in the British cultural context when public health was under challenge. It aims to demonstrate the different epistemic and affective stances of British politicians and experts and to highlight the power of I know in displaying leadership and facilitating solidarity in the discourse of crisis. It may also shed light on the distinctive stance strategies of British public health discourse in terms of the two evidential markers. • I think has great potential for displaying an epistemic stance, either tentative or authoritative. • I know is valuable for constructing the authority of a reliable 'knower' and building solidarity for an empathic 'sayer'. • I think is favoured by British epidemiologists to secure their academic authority flexibly. • British politicians preferred I know to I think in enhancing cooperation and demonstrating leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative study investigates stances in reflective interviews to identify cultural patterns that shape the meaning of language choice within an international unit of an EU institution in Luxembourg. We employ the analytical concept of "language cringe" and propose a complementary concept, "language push," to showcase the effects and reproduction of language ideologies in day-to-day talk about languages at work. Our analysis reveals that, within a workplace culture that encourages flexible and convivial use of multiple languages, French speakers have to deal with the effects of the "logic of honour," which is culturally associated with the use of French in France. Based on our findings, we suggest that language choice should be considered a cross cultural dimension in multilingual environments, and that language-sensitive management scholarship should broaden its considerations beyond the traditional issues of language proficiency, namely by inspecting relational and affective factors that shape language use in multilingual workplaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Globalization has created the academic community’s need to learn English in order to publish internationally and caused intensive research into academic prose by non-native writers with the aim of revealing prevailing culture-and discipline-specific rhetoric structures and suggesting ways of improving academic writing skills. Purpose: This contrastive study explored preferences in the employment of stance features in English-medium research article abstracts by second language writers from two different cultural backgrounds (Russia and China) assuming that variations in stancetaking are culturally shaped. Method: Hyland’s (2005b) taxonomy of stance resources was adopted for the current study as the most comprehensive one including a wide range of writer-oriented features. This taxonomy can help identify pragmatic functions of linguistic markers used for stancetaking in academic prose. The methods of quantitative and qualitative analysis were applied. Results: A contrastive analysis of the findings showed that the Russian and Chinese academic communities manifest different stancetaking preferences. The quantitative analysis revealed that Chinese-authored RA abstracts contained considerably more stance features than those written by their Russian counterparts. Most quantitative differences between the application of stance features by Russian and Chinese authors were statistically significant. It was also revealed that while the Chinese academic writers seemed to be more careful in making claims, anticipating and acknowledging, the Russian scholars chose to create an impression of certainty and assurance, instilling confidence in their readers. The differences in the employment of stance features identified in the study are likely to reflect culture-specific writing peculiarities of the Chinese and Russian academic communities which favour slightly different discursive strategies. Conclusion: The findings carry pedagogical implications for academic writing course designers and can enhance L2 writers’ familiarity with the culture-specific academic writing conventions in the knowledge domain.

This article seeks to show how some syntactical, grammatical or lexical salience strategies work to enable the speaker, in vaccine-hesitant or conspiracy theory contexts, to legitimize their discourses and strengthen their authority as a reliable speaker in order to maximize the audience’s agreement with the theory. We define salience as the result of focusing strategies which do not rely on notions of information packaging, but on the selection of an interlocutive relation that can be disruptive, polemical, or consensual, and which enable the construction of a prevailing point of view. In this regard, such strategies are used for their cognitive effects on the audience, which, for example, allow for the topicalisation and focusing of a presupposed or shared knowledge, or for their argumentative advantage, as they allow for the restriction of meaning and the imposition of the speaker’s interpretation of reality, or for the emphasis on the viewpoint’s validity, significance or reliability.

Previous research has argued that consecutive interpreters constitute laminated speakers in the sense that they engage with different kinds of footing at once, representing another’s point of view through their words in another language. These multiple roles also play out in their gesturing, as they sometimes indicate deictically who is the source of the ideas and stances they are expressing (the principal). Simultaneous interpreters, though, often work in an interpreting booth; they are often not seen by the audience, yet many of them gesture, sometimes frequently. How are simultaneous interpreters using gesture in relation to stance-taking and footing? We consider the case of simultaneous interpreters rendering popular science lectures between (both to and from) Russian (their L1) and either English or German (their L2). Though only hearing the audio of the lectures, the interpreters produced many gestures, which were analyzed for their function. Some representational and deictic gestures appeared to clearly involve the interpreter as the principal (writing numbers with one’s finger to help remember them or pointing to two places on the desk to keep track of two different quantities mentioned). Other representational and deictic gestures are ambiguous as to whether they are enacting what the interpreter may have imagined what the lecturer did or whether they arose out of the interpreter’s own thinking for speaking (e.g., tracing the form of a bird being mentioned or pointing to an empty space when the lecturer was referring to a graph). Pragmatic gestures, showing one’s stance toward the topic of the talk, were the most ambiguous as to the footing, reflecting how the interpreter may be engaged in fictive interaction with their imagined audience. Self-adapters, however, more clearly involve the interpreter as the principal, as such actions are known to support cognitive focussing and self-soothing. In sum, we see varying degrees of clarity as to whose stance and principal footing simultaneous interpreters are expressing bodily as laminated speakers. The variable ambiguity can be attributed to the nature of gesture as a semiotic system, the functions of which are more often dependent on co-occurring speech than vice versa.

AbstractThe present study examines and describes the process of stance-taking and engagement in the arbitration theories related to the family court grounded on Hyland’s (2008) approach to voice and stance-taking. In divorce cases, the judge asks each of the parties (wife/husband) to nominate an arbitrator who is supposed to present the result of his/her considerations on each of the parties to the judge in terms of a theory. In this research, 36 arbitration theories were selected for discussion and analysis. Eighteen theories are related to the arbitrators selected by the parties, which are non-specialist theories, and eighteen cases are related to the theory of court-selected arbitrators, which are called specialized theories. After examining the data based on quantitative and qualitative approaches, it was found that stance markers and (to a lesser extent) engagement markers have a pivotal role in the formation of the discourse of arbitration theory. This goes to the extent that for every 59.26 words in the corpus, there is one stance and engagement marker. Likewise, the comparison of specialized and non-specialized theories shows that specialized theories have more descriptive and explanatory sufficiency.Keywords: Arbitration theory; Engagement; Family court; Judicial discourse Analysis; Stance. IntroductionStance markers can be considered as one of the most influential discursive-linguistic media through which subjects can choose to represent their views in different contexts. For instance, judicial and trial context is included in cases and contexts where taking a stance, as a discursive act, can play a significant role in the evaluation, interpretation and judgment of a discursive and/or non-discursive events. Although stance-taking has been studied in a wide range of discourses (Abdi, 2010; Biber, 2006; Hyland, 2005, 2008), the study of its various strategies and functions in judicial discourse has not received much attention and it is of undeniable importance. The reason for this importance is that in judicial discourse, taking a stance in relation to an issue plays a key role in arranging and structuring arguments and perceptions to attract the opinion of judges. Therefore, in this research, we intend to examine the phenomenon mentioned in the arbitration reports in family cases. In cases where couples refer to the family court for divorce, the court refers the issue to the arbitrator to create peace and compromise between them and finally issues a decision based on the arbitrators' point of view. In this connection, the Article 28 of the Family Protection Law states that “after the issuance of the order to refer the matter to arbitration, each of the parties is obliged to introduce one of their relatives as an arbitrator to the civil court within one week from the date of notification.is the arbitrator should be at least thirty years old, male, married and familiar with Sharia, family and social issues.” Addressing the divorce matter to arbitration process, from appointing an arbitrator to announcing his opinion to the court, is a time-consuming process, and it also imposes costs on people. On this account, whether such theories can be effective and functional recognizing the necessity of long stages during the judicial process is an enquiry that has to be taken into account. Furthermore, insofar as the arbitration has to be impartial and unbiased, the central puzzle to be resolved is that how one can depend on the impartiality of the theories submitted to the judge give the fact that the arbitrators are introduced by the divorce parties? To put it differently, it is of indubitable importance to ask whether family ties and relations will influence evaluations and theories? Considering issues as such can validate the importance and necessity of the current research. Based on the material presented in the current research, we will investigate taking a stance in arbitration opinions. To this end, we will employ Hyland’s approach (2008) to stance-taking engagement. Therefore, this research aims to provide justifiable answer the following queries:What, discursive strategies and linguistic tools are constitutive of stance-taking and engagement?What is the frequency of linguistic tools and discursive strategies of stance-taking and engagement in arbitration reports? Materials and methodsThe corpus of the present research consists of 36 arbitration theories extracted from the divorce cases of the family court of Doroud, a city in court of Doroud (a city in Lorestan Province) After examining 86 cases, we opted eighteen expert and non-expert theories of arbitration for analysis. The total number of words in the corpus is 7391. The present research examines and analyzes the data with a descriptive and analytical approach based on quantitative and qualitative components. For the qualitative aspect, we recruited Hyland's (2008) approach to stance-taking and engagement. Concerning the quantitative aspect, we used the Antconc (3.5.8) concordance software and statistical analysis. In so doing, through the Antconc software, we obtained the frequency of the words in the corpus. In the next step, based on Hyland's (2008) proposed tools to study stance and engagement items and instances, we classified them according to the research objectives. We also used statistical analysis to obtain the raw frequency and measure the frequency of the desired components in the scale of 1000 words. It is worth mentioning that during the rewriting of the reports, all the personal information of the referees, feuding parties (wife/ husband), have been changed in order to protect the parties’ private information. Discussion and conclusionsFor the quantitative examination of our data, first, the interaction indicators were studied in the form of raw frequency and then in the scale of 1000 words. The findings indicate that arbitrators have used (381) stance and (57) engagement elements in their arbitration reports in their interaction with the addressee (judge). The frequency of interaction elements in the whole corpus is (438) and the frequency in the scale of 1000 words also shows that for every (59/62) words, a stance and engagement marker is used, which means that the interaction elements (both stance markers and engagement markers) form an important part of the discourse of arbitration theories. Table 1- Frequency of stance markers in arbitration reports (total 7391words).frequency in 1000 wordsraw frequencystance markers11/7787hedges13/3999boosters11/5085attitude markers14/88110self-mention51/54381total Table 2- Frequency of engagement markers in arbitration reports (total 7391words).frequency in 1000 wordsraw frequencyengagement markers4/8736reader mention00asides2/8421Shared knowledge00directives00questions7/7157total As it can be seen in table (1), among the characteristics related to stance-taking, self-mention elements and attitude markers respectively have the highest and lowest occurrence rates in the corpus.Examining the frequency of each of the linguistic elements of stance and engagement confirms that the elements of self-mention and attitude markers have the highest and lowest occurrence rates among the types of ways of expressing stance, respectively. Self-mention is a strategy that the author relies on to highlight his presence in the text, and it is observed in the corpus of the present research in the form of personal pronouns and present identifiers of the first person singular (and sometimes plural). The reason why this indicator is used more than other indicators is that in the theories of arbitration, the arbitrator tries to reflect the actions taken towards couples in order to create a compromise between them in his theory based on the responsibility assigned to him by the judge. This way also validates the result of his arbitration. All stance markers, including the use of the first-person pronoun, are tools for persuading the addressee (judge). Regarding the attitude markers, it should be said that the relatively low frequency of this type of markers in comparison with other markers is due to the fact that sometimes it is not possible to have a clear and decisive boundary between the types of markers, because for example, a linguistic structure may in a context show a positive attitude and, in another context, it expresses a negative attitude. For example, the use of reporting speech in scientific genres can increase the validity and accuracy of the author's statements, while in the theories of judgment, they are considered a form of doubt and indirectly show the author's uncertainty about the statements made. In the corpus of the current research, the frequency of positive markers was summarized in only three cases, the reason for which is the specific discourse of these theories, because the arbitrator’s opinion is usually considered when the probability of compromise between couples is low. The negative attitudes in all the reports have three main purposes: targeting the character of the couples, the consequences of not issuing a divorce decree, and announcing the arbitrator’s personal opinion. Regarding engagement markers in the corpus, we can only consider two types of reader pronouns and shared knowledge, because other engagement strategies such as questions, directives, and asides are considered to be a kind of face threatening linguistic actions, in such a way that they do not consider the position and face of the judge as a powerful participant.

The process of identification and annotation of evaluation has received a lot of attention in recent years. However, given the complexity of the topic, the discussion of some of the central issues is still ongoing. The present article contributes to this debate by presenting an annotation scheme that is designed for the identification and annotation of evaluative stance in a corpus of four English genres, namely, newspaper discourse, political discourse, newspaper scientific popularization and fora. A 4,862-word corpus was sampled from a larger 400,000-word corpus compiled within the research project STANCEDISC on the study of stance in discourse varieties. The scheme posits a series of ad hoc categories designed to optimise the transparency, reliability and replicability of the identification, annotation and analysis of evaluative stance. The categories are as follows: parts of speech (Noun Phrase, NP; Adjectival Phrase, AP; Adverbial Phrase, ADVP; Verbal Phrase, VP), function (classifying, predicational and attitude), metaphoricity (metaphoric and non-metaphoric), and value (positive and negative). The aim of this paper is to explain the scheme together with the theoretical justification of the categories and the methodological procedure adopted, and to illustrate the implementation of the scheme by discussing examples taken from different genres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Based on the examination of 49 Chinese criminal trials transcribed from the audio-visual recordings on the 'China Court Trial Online' website (https://tingshen.court.gov.cn/), the institutional participants–prosecutors, defence lawyers, and judges–are found to frequently repeat defendants' responses ('other-repetition'), after a question–answer adjacency pair. Other-repetition has been described as a resource for showing participation and familiarity (Tannen 2007), initiating repair and registering receipt (Schegloff 1997), and displaying understanding and emotional stance (Svennevig 2004). However, other-repetition in trial discourse has not been thoroughly researched. Therefore, this article aims to further examine this salient institutional linguistic feature in order to explore stance construction as a third turn. It is common to associate certain prosodic features of a repetition with the stance of the speaker. However, prosody may not be a reliable cue for stance interpretation in Chinese courtrooms, as institutional participants might conceal their stance during a repetition. Though they are more explicit in displaying their stance with turn-initial repeats, the distinction between the prosody of repeats for different functions is not categorical. It is found that defendants are sensitive to the lexicogrammar and multimodal cues for stance interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study examines and describes the process of stance-taking and engagement in the arbitration theories related to the family court grounded on Hyland’s (2008) approach to voice and stance-taking. In divorce cases, the judge asks each of the parties (wife/husband) to nominate an arbitrator who is supposed to present the result of his/her considerations on each of the parties to the judge in terms of a theory. In this research, 36 arbitration theories were selected for discussion and analysis. Eighteen theories are related to the arbitrators selected by the parties, which are non-specialist theories, and eighteen cases are related to the theory of court-selected arbitrators, which are called specialized theories. After examining the data based on quantitative and qualitative approaches, it was found that stance markers and (to a lesser extent) engagement markers have a pivotal role in the formation of the discourse of arbitration theory. This goes to the extent that for every 59.26 words in the corpus, there is one stance and engagement marker. Likewise, the comparison of specialized and non-specialized theories shows that specialized theories have more descriptive and explanatory sufficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reconciles the sociolinguistic concept of stance and stancetaking and Construction Grammar (CxG); it shows that overlapping allostructions may differ in terms of the stances they convey. Drawing on a corpus study of Wikipedia Talk pages, the paper presents a case study of German discourse management markers such as wo wir gerade dabei sind 'speaking of which' or wenn wir schon dabei sind 'while we're at it'. By statistically comparing the observed frequencies of the filler items with the expected ones (using Hierarchical Configural Frequency Analysis and Distinctive Collexeme Analysis), I will argue that there are two different collocational types, namely wo wir/ich gerade bei NP sind/bin 'as we are/I am just at NP' and wenn wir/du schon bei NP sind/bist 'as we/you are already at NP'. Both serve as discourse management markers, topic orientation markers in particular, whose purpose it is to shift the topic. They involve the same fixed pattern, combining the same categorical slots. However, they diverge in collocational preferences. I will argue that these collocational preferences are indicative of the stances the allostructions conventionally convey: While the allostruction wo wir/ich gerade PP sind/bin seems to be neutral in terms of stance (face-less stance), wenn wir/du schon PP sind/bist is often used to express negative evaluation of a previous utterance made by an interlocutor, thus marking disalignment. The expression of disalignment seems to be related to the construction's propensity to reference utterances made by an interlocutor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Jane Austen's novels conversation provides internal evidence of the nature of characters, both moral and social (Morini, 2009). Among the interplay of speech presentation forms (Bray, 2018; Page, 1972), Narrative Report of Speech Acts (Leech and Short, 2007) is still underresearched (Busse, 2020) as a characterisation resource. Research on speech reports in inquit formulae has focused on illocutionary features (Austin, 1962; Searle and Vanderveken, 1985). However, speech reports also introduce the intersubjective stances adopted by characters and by the narrator, i.e., their receptiveness to disagreeing positions. As engagement resources (Martin and White, 2005), they construct interpersonal styles and offer cues into the narrator's own stance toward the characters. Such meaning complexes are a challenge for literary translators. For this study, 55 instances of NRSA were sampled from three chapters of Mansfield Park and their correspondences in two Spanish and two German translations. The original text and the translations display remarkable lexical richness, with 36 instances overtly expressing illocutionary force. Characterisation cues appear at the character level of discourse, through the illocutionary features and engagement types attributed to characters (e.g. monoglossic, heteroglossic), and also on the narrator level of discourse, through linguistic co-textual choices weakening the endorsement of the character. All four translations contain shifts affecting the characterisation potential such as changes in a character's stance, the early disclosure of a character's attitude, and the insertion of explicit narratorial evaluation of a character. These findings are applicable in stylistics as well as in translation assessment and pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the discourse functions of BE expected to and BE supposed to in the genre of judicial opinion, providing insights into discipline-specific practices of epistemological positioning. Drawing on the 130 million words Corpus of US Supreme Court Opinions, it looks at how the two mindsay constructions were deployed in judicial writing over a period of more than 200 years, and identifies divergent frequency patterns associated with their use. As the findings reveal, in the opinions, on the one hand, BE expected to tends to co-occur with reasonably (can/could (not) reasonably be expected to) and is used to create a semblance of objectivity. BE supposed to, on the other hand, favors the present tense and third-person reference (which/it is supposed to) and serves as a distancing device. The paper also compares the frequency patterns involving BE expected to and BE supposed to found in the opinions with those attested in the Corpus of Historical American English, and it demonstrates that judicial writing exhibits trends which clearly differ from trends noted in non-judicial registers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authors' rebuttal letters (ARLs) in response to journal reviewers critically affect whether a paper is accepted or rejected. However, the genre is traditionally "occluded" from the public view, and its linguistic or rhetorical features are seldom examined in the literature. Using Hyland's (2005) model, this study analyzes stance markers, i.e., expressions of the speaker's attitudes towards or commitment concerning a proposition, in 50 ARLs from five high-impact Nature Portfolio journals, which started publishing ARLs as supplements to manuscripts in 2020. The analysis shows that authors' stance deployment differs markedly between different sections of the ARL, i.e., Opening Statement, Point-by-Point Response, Additional Changes, and Closing Remarks. Attitude markers, boosters, and self-mentions are more frequent in ARLs than in research articles, serving to advocate the paper, highlight improvements, and show gratitude towards reviewers. Only 6 % ARLs fully accommodate all reviewer suggestions. When rejecting a criticism, authors rarely express total disagreement with reviewers, choosing instead to hedge the No Revision claims, use expressions of agreement and gratitude as buffers, and boost positive aspects of the paper. Findings of this study may be of interest to those who seek a better understanding of the language of ARLs, including ESP teachers and novice researchers. • 94 % authors' rebuttal letters (ARLs) contain No/Partial Revision responses. • Replies to criticisms contain fewer self-mentions than replies to positive comments. • Attitude markers showing gratitude and merits of paper are common throughout ARLs. • Hedging is most prevalent in No Revision responses, serving to soften disagreement. • Boosters reinforce self-praise, especially in No/Partial Revision responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies of interactional particles have shown that a particle's social meaning may be contextually contingent and a momentary instantiation of the form's core meaning. This paper shows how analysing particles using Blommaert and De Fina's (2017) chronotopic frame approach provides greater insight into the dialectic relationship between forms' meanings that are relatively transitory or perduring. This paper illustrates the contributions of chronotopic frame approaches by using this framework to analyse how three distinct interactionally emergent social meanings of the Pontianak Malay particle bah are connected to the particle's core meaning of 'shared knowledge'. • Examines how Pontianak Malay particle bah conveys contextually sensitive social meanings in interaction. • Explores dialectic relationship between interactionally emergent and more perduring core meanings of particles. • Illustrates benefits of chronotopic frame approaches to study of interactional particles' meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is a compilation of references and citations from academic articles and studies on the topic of linguistic units, stance, and metadiscourse in academic writing. The references cover various topics such as the use of self-mention markers, authorial presence, disciplinary differences in writing, and the analysis of metadiscourse markers. These articles provide valuable insights into the linguistic features and strategies employed in academic writing across different disciplines and languages. [Extracted from the article]

From a conversation-analytic perspective, this article analyzes three types of verbal negation in Korean, which shape requests for confirmation (RfCs) into distinctive interactional resources. The pre-verbal negation (an) RfC emerges in the context where the recipient is prompted to see the "fittedness" of its confirmable as referencing an "allusive" aspect of his/her situated domain, inferentially formulated by the questioner as a "negative event." The post-verbal negation (ci anh) renders the RfC a vehicle for making mitigated assertions, seeking the recipient's agreement in acquiescence to the questioner's "problematizing" stance. The use of post-nominalization negation (nun-ke ani) RfC exhibits the questioner's "conjecturing" stance, displaying norm-based deontic orientations treating the noted event at hand as deviant or counter-expectational. The target of the confirmable is formulated an "entity" assessable by the recipient as an externally-positioned co-member/evaluator. Cross-linguistic implications of the findings are discussed, in relation to English tag questions and negative interrogatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communicating scientific research to the public is as important as ever. Several studies have investigated the ways that science writers communicate personal feelings and assessments, otherwise known as stance, in their writing, reporting somewhat mixed results. In this study, I examine the grammatical stance marking of science news articles. I compare the ways that writers and the researchers that they quote uniquely contribute to the overall expression of stance in these articles. Results reveal that the researchers’ talk substantially contribute to the overall stance of science news articles compared to their writers, indicated by a greater use of modal verbs, stance verbs and adjectives controlling that complement clauses, and stance adverbials, including a greater use of ‘boosters’. This study suggests that researchers’ talk in science news articles co-participate in the newsworthiness of science and offer an alternative perspective on academic research uncommon in research writing.

Although research into multimodal stance-taking has gained momentum over the past years, the multimodal construction of so-called stacked stances has not yet received systematic attention in the literature. Mocking enactments are a prime example of such complex social actions as they are layered both interactionally and stance-related, and they rely significantly on the use of bodily visual resources, depicting rather than describing events and stances. Using Du Bois’ Stance Triangle as a framework, this study investigates mocking enactments as a case study to unravel the multimodal aspects of layered stance expressions. Drawing on three data sets—music instruction in Dutch, German, and English, spontaneous face-to-face interactions among friends in Dutch, and narrations on past events in Flemish Sign Language (VGT)—this study provides a qualitative exploration of mocking enactments across different communicative settings, languages, and modalities. The study achieves three main objectives: (1) illuminating how enactments are used for mocking, (2) identifying the layers of stance-taking at play, and (3) examining the multimodal construction of mocking enactments. Our analysis reveals various different uses of enactments for mocking. Aside from enacting the target of the mockery, participants can include other characters and viewpoints, highlighting the breadth of the phenomenon under scrutiny. Second, we uncover the layered construction of stance on all axes of the Stance Triangle (evaluation, positioning, and alignment). Third, we find that mocking enactments are embedded in highly evaluative contexts, indexed by the use of bodily visual resources. Interestingly, not all mocking enactments include a multimodally exaggerated depiction, but instead, some merely allude to an absurd hypothetical scenario. Our findings contribute to the growing body of literature on multimodal stance-taking, by showing how a nuanced interpretation of the Stance Triangle can offer a useful framework for analyzing layered stance acts.