Dialogic Rhetoric:
Stance and Intersubjectivity in the Syntax of Engagement

by John Du Bois

This paper seeks to take seriously the idea of dialogicality as way of renewing our conception of the rhetorical voicing of stance and evaluation in the context of culture and interaction. One of the most important things we do with words is to take a stance, yet very little is known at present about this phenomenon: how do we do it, what role language (and specifically syntax) plays in the process, and what consequences are brought about by the rhetorical act of taking a stance. This paper show that stance has its consequences - for ethnographically situated meaning, for speaker's self-positioning, for hearer's evaluations of speaker's stance, for the act of engagement between speakers, for the dialogic constitution of culture, and ultimately for evaluation of speaker's rhetorically constituted persona. It proposes a dialogic model of stance-taking: stance is defined as a tri-partite act in which a speaker uses language to simultaneously (1) evaluate an object, (2) position the subject (self), and (3) align with other subjects. These three acts correspond to three major dimensions of language use - objective, subjective, and intersubjective, respectively - and together constitute stance-taking. Stance-taking is a delicate dance in the public space of dialogic interaction, whose rhetorical consequences for social actors include positioning them with respect to affect, epistemology, illocution, obligation, morality and other socially salient categories. Because the users of language (and rhetoric) are always socially positioned actors, and because they continually engage formally with others, they are held accountable for their joint dialogic actions of stancetaking. The dialogic stance model proposes a unified understanding of language use capable of accounting for both the process and the consequences of stance-taking. Drawing on the analytical framework of dialogic syntax, this paper also seeks to show how stance-taking acts can be further elucidated by examining the formal analogic mapping between the utterances of dialogic co-participants. In a certain sense, the shared object of their stancetaking, like the shared words and structures they jointly exploit, serve both to unite and to divide interlocutors, as they each position themselves through the very act of evaluating another. Speakers - as social actors within rhetoric culture - articulate convergent and divergent alignment in their positioning of selves relative to others. Moreover, speakers often observed to construct their stances through modification of a stance already on the table, as the product of an immediately prior act of stance-taking by another discourse participant. This palimpsest process of "stance inflection" is shown to be a pervasive and more or less continuously calibrated process by which conversational participants arrive dialogically at emergent stances that no individual could take on their own. The rhetorical voice spans beyond the current speaking subject to encompass those who have spoken before - both now and anon, present and absent - in ways that must inform our understanding of rhetorical action and the culture it lives in and constructs.