The modifier 'ideological conceptions' should signal that there is no claim being made for categorical difference or essentialist explanation. Note that the subject of the essay is ideological conceptions of gender that influence the use of language by people who identify themselves as more masculine or feminine (often referred to as 'men and women' respectively). It is hoped that this exploration produces a perspective that can be adopted in other speech communities and for other ideological identity categories beyond gender and sexuality such as class, race, ethnicity, and nationality. The general argument deploys the notion of affect as it is used in cultural studies, and pairs it with a model of stancetaking to connect observable linguistic patterns in discourse and speech communities with ideological conceptions of gender in the United States. Sattel's work was followed up hardly at all, probably because it was difficult to quantify 'inexpressiveness.' This essay will explore this dichotomy in 'expressiveness' using a contemporary viewpoint, drawing on approaches and theories developed in language, gender, and sexuality studies-and in gender studies-in the several decades following Lakoff and Sattel's work. These quantitative attempts yielded mixed results, mostly because the linguistic items on the 'women's language' list are multifunctional and need to be understood in context rather than comparing simple totals. Lakoff's work was followed up with vigorous attempts to count the features that she identified in 'women's language'-hedges, boosters, tag questions-and compare the rates of use for these terms between women and men. In her classic (1975) Language and Woman's Place, one of Robin Lakoff's arguments hinged on the idea that women are expected to speak with more emotion than men-in her poetic phrasing, that women 'speak in italics.' Later, Jack Sattell (1983) argued that men's 'inexpressiveness' helps them maintain power in relationships. I hope the book inspires researchers in other languages to test the model presented for other languages with a view to revising it. While most my own research and examples are in English, I will provide notes on what kinds of devices and possibilities there are for other languages. Stance can be a very abstract and ‘fuzzy’ topic the style of this book will be such that while it uses jargon as necessary, it does not presuppose an extensive background in any of the target subfields, only a basic understanding of what one would learn in an introductory sociolinguistics course. The final section is a ‘how to’ primer for researchers who want to use stance in their analyses. In part II, I develop the ideas further by applying stance and showing how it has been, and how it can be, used to explain patterns in discourse/interaction and sociolinguistic variation. I then explicate a theory of stance more fully. The first part of the book is theoretical after a brief discussion of how I conceive of stance, I explain how it relates to and draws from other similar ideas such as footing, positioning, and other ideas. Synopsis The book is both theoretical and methodological exploration of the usefulness of the notion of stance and stancetaking for a broadly-conceived field of sociolinguistics. There is considerable interest in using the concept in all of these fields, but there remain important recurring questions such as “What is it?” “How do I find it?” and “How is it useful?” This book will attempt to move the answers to those questions forward. Rationale The notion of stance and stancetaking has been increasingly appealed to as the motivations for patterns of language use found in discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, and sociolinguistic variation.
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