Introduction to stance language

Abstract

This paper presents a brief overview of stance language and the numerous linguistic phenomena included in the notion of stance. The paper also comments on the relation of corpus linguistics (CL) methodology and the study of stance devices in discourse. Although some of the drawbacks of this methodology are identified, the view in this study is very positive because CL allows the unparalleled analysis, interrogation and indexing of large amounts of texts only achievable through computing means. This introductory paper concerning the description of stance language and CL seeks to give context for the four articles contained in this special issue of Research in Corpus Linguistics. These contributions come to demonstrate the validity of CL methodology for the study of hedging, evaluation, style, and modality in different registers and specialised domains.