Description: Stancetaking-or speaker positioning-is central to communication. This collected volume explores stancetaking as a sociolinguistic phenomenon, looking at how speakers use language to position themselves and others and exploring how speakers and writers make use of and sometimes transform the meaning of sociolinguistic variables in their acts of stance.
Review Quotes: "Stance covers every facet of the field, from variationist to interactionist to ethnographic sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, providing a unifying concept which allows for exciting new avenues of analysis. This is a major contribution toward untangling the web of relationships between agency and structuration, and toward understanding the complex processes of social change." --Monica Heller, University of Toronto