There is no registration fee to attend the symposium, but you will need to pre-register by sending an e-mail to Robert Englebretson at reng {at} rice.edu.
The expression of attitude is one of the most fundamental and multifaceted human activities accomplished through and reflected in language. Humans evaluate the world around them, express emotions, beliefs, and desires, and align or disalign with others in social interaction. These aspects of human experience have been addressed from divergent but related fields such as linguistics, sociology, and anthropology, and a common understanding has recently begun to crystallize around the notion of stancetaking. Research on facets of stancetaking has been carried out under labels such as evaluation, subjectivity, epistemicity, footing, alignment, assessment, epistemology, agency, and ideology. Unfortunately, however, the boundaries and methodologies of specific disciplines and subfields have tended to obscure the cross-disciplinary relevance and interdependence of this work. Traditional linguistic approaches have tended to focus on the subjective dimensions of stancetaking, treating it from the monologic perspective of individual language users. Anthropological research has tended to focus on the cultural contingencies of stancetaking, and the construction of morality and responsibility. Sociological and ethnomethodological approaches recognize stance as co-constructed among participants within the dialogic world of interaction. Stancetaking permeates human experience at all levels, but our understanding of these phenomena remains incomplete and fragmentary.
The 10th Biennial Rice Linguistics Symposium seeks to bring together researchers of differing backgrounds and intellectual interests who address stancetaking in naturally-occurring discourse. The symposium seeks to foster cross-disciplinary dialogue and integration, in order to arrive at a richer and more unified perspective. As such, the symposium is situated squarely in the burgeoning field which has come to be known as ‘interactional linguistics’—bringing together the quantitative methodology of discourse/corpus linguistics and the qualitative methodology of ethnography and Conversation Analysis, to gain insight into language form and function as well as cultural construction and social interaction. Research questions include, but are not limited to:
This symposium is both international in character and interdisciplinary in scope. Participants have been invited from several countries, and research will address languages as diverse as English, Finnish, Indonesian, Sakapulteko Maya, and others. The methodology of participants includes, but is not limited to: corpus linguistics, conversation analysis, discourse analysis, typology, ethnographic methods, ethnomethodology, and interactional sociolinguistics. For purposes of this symposium, what all of these approaches share is the analysis of naturally-occurring language data (either spoken, written, or signed) in its full sociocultural and interactional contexts of use.
All talks will take place in the Kyle Morrow Room of Fondren Library, on the campus of Rice University.
Paper abstracts are no longer available.
| Wednesday, March 31 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| 6:00-9:00pm | Symposium Reception and Banquet, Rice University Cohen House (faculty club), RSVP required. | ||
| Thursday, April 1 | |||
| 9:00-9:15am | Announcements/Opening Remarks | ||
| 9:15-10:15 | "The Subjective and Interactive Character of Generalization in English Conversation" | Joanne Scheibman | Old Dominion University |
| 10:15-11:15 | "Patterns of stance taking: On the prosodic - interactional features of negative yes/no type interrogatives in spoken American English" | Tiina Keisanen | University of Oulu, Finland |
| 11:15-11:30 | Coffee Break | ||
| 11:30-12:30 | "The Two Q’s: Using a corpus to investigate stance quantitatively and qualitatively" | Susan Hunston | University of Birmingham, UK |
| 12:30-2:00 | Lunch (location TBA) | ||
| 2:00-3:00 | "Stance taking in TV interviews: Practices of positioning and alignment" | Pentti Haddington | University of Oulu, Finland |
| 3:00-3:15 | Coffee Break | ||
| 3:15-4:15 | "The Terms of Agreement: Indexing Epistemic Authority and Subordination in Talk-in-Interaction" | Geoffrey Raymond | University of California Santa Barbara |
| 4:15-4:30 | Announcements | ||
| 6:00-8:30 | Dinner: Tex-Mex (location TBA) | ||
| Friday, April 2 | |||
| 9:00am-1:00pm | Symposium-sponsored Field Trip to the Houston Museum District | ||
| 1:15-2:15 | "General resources for specific purposes: some aspects of stancetaking in colloquial Indonesian conversation" | Robert Englebretson | Rice University |
| 2:15-3:15 | "Where stance-taking and culture meet: Sakapultek conventions for representing and evaluating stances" | Robin Shoaps | University of California Santa Barbara, & Center for Language, Interaction and Culture, UCLA |
| 3:15-3:30 | Coffee Break | ||
| 3:30-4:30 | "Four Ways To Sound Like a Pittsburgher: Stancetaking and Vernacular Norm-Formation" | Barbara Johnstone | Carnegie Mellon University |
| 6:00-8:30 | Dinner: Texas BBQ (location TBA) | ||
| Saturday, April 3 | |||
| 9:00-10:00am | "The Intersubjectivity of Interaction" | John W. Du Bois | University of California Santa Barbara, & Fulbright Senior Scholar (2003-2004), Tel Aviv University, Israel |
| 10:00-11:00 | "Stance markers in spoken Finnish: minun mielestä and minusta" | Mirka Rauniomaa | University of Oulu, finland |
| 11:00-11:15 | Coffee Break | ||
| 11:15-12:15 | "Practices of stance-taking: stance frames and beyond" | Elise Kärkkäinen | University of Oulu, Finland |
| 12:15-1:30 | Lunch (location TBA) | ||
| 1:30-onward | Roundtable / open-forum discussion on stancetaking | ||
| 6:00-8:30 | Dinner (location TBA) |
The 10th Biennial Rice Linguistics Symposium is sponsored by:
There is no registration fee to attend the symposium, but you will need to pre-register by sending an e-mail to Robert Englebretson at reng {at} rice.edu.
All presentations, including the Saturday-afternoon roundtable, will take place in the Kyle Morrow Room of Fondren Library, on the campus of Rice University.
For more information about the symposium, or to pre-register to attend, contact Dr. Robert Englebretson at reng {at} rice.edu or by phone at (713) 348-4776.
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