Operationalising stance in sociolinguistics: Insights from urban and rural settings

TRANSITION Talk with Katharina Pabst, Radboud University.

In conversation, we constantly show where we stand – towards the people we speak with and the subjects we talk about. Often, this happens through very small linguistic choices that pass almost unnoticed. This talk explores how such choices shape interaction and what they can tell us about the social meaning of language.

Katharina Pabst takes as her starting point the concept of stance: the ways speakers express attitudes, position themselves in relation to others, and signal how they relate to what is being said. Although sociolinguists have long been interested in these processes, they are difficult to study in a consistent way because they are so closely tied to context and interaction. The talk presents work that seeks to make these subtle patterns easier to identify by combining close, qualitative attention to interaction with quantitative analysis.

Drawing on examples from an urban setting in Toronto and comparing it with a rural community in Maine, Katharina Pabst shows how even very small words – such as whether a speaker includes or leaves out a word like “that” – can be meaningful. Looking closely at such moments makes it possible to see how speakers negotiate relationships, express alignment or distance, and respond to different social situations in real time.

By following these small linguistic choices across different settings, the talk offers a way of connecting detailed observations of interaction with broader patterns of language use. It becomes possible to see how speakers orient themselves differently depending on context, and how meaning is shaped not only by what is said, but by how it is said—and where.

Please sign up for the talk here.

Bio

Katharina Pabst is Assistant Professor of English Linguistics at Radboud University in Nijmegen. Her research examines how language varies across time and space, with a focus on how speakers use linguistic variation to index aspects of identity and align with others in interaction. Drawing on variationist sociolinguistics, sociocultural linguistics, and corpus linguistics, her work combines methodological precision with a strong interest in language as social practice