Epistemic and effective stances: a conceptualisation and annotation system for discourse on socially relevant issues

This paper advances an illocutionary-pragmatic conceptualisation of epistemic and effective stance and presents an annotation system for their analysis in discourse on socially relevant issues. Epistemic stance is defined as a speaker’s or writer’s attempt to shape addressees’ understanding of the world, by providing justificatory support for the validity of communicated information through representative speech acts, and is typically realised through linguistic resources associated with epistemic modality, evidentiality and factivity. Effective stance, by contrast, is defined as a speaker’s or writer’s attempt to shape addressees’ prospective courses of action, and is realised through directive and commissive speech acts, including imperatives and non-epistemic modalities such as deontic, dynamic and volitional modality. Building on this conceptual distinction, the paper presents an annotation system developed within the RACISMMAFF research project for the analysis of epistemic and effective stance in newspaper and political discourse on migration across languages and cultural contexts. The system supports the systematic identification of similarities and differences in the expression of stance across languages, cultures, ideologies and discourse genres. Particular attention is paid to methodological challenges that emerged during annotation, including degrees of propositional explicitness, subjectivity, the co-occurrence of multiple stance markers, temporal reference and counterfactuality. Although originally developed for the analysis of migration discourse, the system is proposed as a flexible model for the study of stance in other socially consequential discourse domains, such as climate change, public health, electoral politics and contested forms of social inequality.