This is a rich and varied collection of studies at the intersection of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, examining a number of traditional sociolinguistic issues from the perspective of stance. Given that, as Alexandra Jaffe notes in the introduction (‘Introduction: The sociolinguistics of stance’), speaker positionality is built in the very act of communication, stancetaking is a ripe subject for sociolinguistic study. The volume is also timely, given the vigorous interest in stancetaking in discourse over the last decade, marked most prominently by monographs by Gardner (Reference Gardner2001), Mushin (Reference Mushin2001), Kärkkäinen (Reference Kärkkäinen2003) and Wu (Reference Wu2004) and the appearance of Englebretson's (Reference Englebretson2007) collection. This volume constitutes an ideal sociolinguistic counterpart to the latter, anchoring work on stance in contexts as varied as a Corsican school, nineteenth-century letters from a West African mission, Sakapultek discourse, and travelogues in contemporary British newspapers.

As this heterogeneous range of material implies, there is no one definition of stance to which all the contributors adhere; as Judith T. Irvine helpfully puts it in her chapter, it is perhaps best thought of as a family of concepts, with its genealogies in several academic disciplines, but with the common thread that stance concerns the speaker or author's evaluation and assessment, either of some object of discourse or of an interlocutor (53). Jaffe's introduction plots a useful path through the thicket of overlapping approaches to stance, touching on the social and moral dimensions of evaluation and alignment, and identifying some major themes in sociolinguistic research that are here illuminated by reference to the concept of stance. If this concept was linguistic in origin (as suggested by the predominantly linguistic focus of the contributions to Englebretson Reference Englebretson2007), Jaffe traces some of the convergent work on stance with a specific sociological and sociolinguistic lineage. Erving Goffman's concept of footing, anchored in the alignments speakers take up towards what they say, and originating in his (Reference Goffman1981) observations of social interaction, comes in for useful re-evaluation here. The central sociolinguistic concern of how speaking styles, originating in stance, are thereby implicated in the attribution of social identity and production of ideology is introduced here and emerges as a dominant theme across the contributions to this volume.

The chapters by Irvine, Janet McIntosh and Robin Shoaps bring the notion of footing to the fore. Irvine's examination of nineteenth-century correspondence between missionaries in Nigeria and church authorities in London focuses on how stancetaking is accomplished with respect to the ‘faultable’ actions of one of the missionaries, Mr. Taylor. The subtitle of the chapter, ‘Stance in a colonial encounter: How Mr. Taylor lost his footing’, points to the main thrust of the analysis – the limits of individual agency. As Irvine's examination of the correspondence shows, ‘[a] stance can be given or accorded, rather than taken’. In this particular case, ‘the specifics of a speaker's linguistic acts scarcely matter’, caught up as they are in a complex web of ‘retroactively imputed stances, other parties' positionings, the complexity of mediations, and the unanticipated audiences who find fault and impose consequences' (70).

Similarly, the chapter by McIntosh on white Kenyans' statements of belief about black African witchcraft (‘Stance and distance: Social boundaries, self-lamination, and metalinguistic anxiety in white Kenyan narratives about the African occult’) uses Goffman's notion of footing and participant roles to bring out the multiple, contradictory attitudes displayed towards the occult. As McIntosh notes, ‘[a]lthough white Kenyans in the postcolonial era still align their values and their preferred identities away from stances marked as “African”, their ontological stances appear to have been influenced by a sociocultural field that, after many decades of contact, overlaps with those of black Kenyans’ (89). Thus professions of disbelief in the occult sit alongside descriptions, in interviews, of appeal to witchcraft for personal protection.

In Shoaps's chapter on Sakapultek discourse (‘Moral irony and moral personhood in Sakapultek discourse and culture’), footing, and in particular the importance of the Goffmanian ‘principal’ (responsible for the stance expressed in the utterance), is used in an examination of what she calls ‘moral irony’ in an indirect evaluative stancetaking that presupposes certain values as shared. Shoaps's nuanced account throws into relief much of the writing about irony in Anglo-American contexts; she proposes that ‘accounting for irony, not only in the Sakapultek case, but in general, hinges not on intention but on indexicality’ (113).

Acts of individual stancetaking are, when recurrently assumed, the origins of distinctive speaking styles. A number of chapters in this volume address the connections between the sociolinguistics of stance and approaches to style and stylisation. In her contribution, ‘Stance, style, and the linguistic individual’, Barbara Johnstone uses the case study of one speaker – the African-American politician Barbara Jordan – to illustrate the genesis of a recognisable style. By drawing on historical, biographical, textual and interview evidence, and examining how Jordan uses a consistent style of stance across time and situation, the analysis shows how Jordan indexes ‘a consistent, unchanging self anchored in a morally and epistemologically absolutist world’ (47).

Scott F. Kiesling's chapter, ‘Style as stance’, makes the connection between stance and style explicit, seeking to use stance in explaining patterns of sociolinguistic variation. In proposing that ‘stancetaking is always a speaker's primary concern in conversation’ (179), Kiesling uses three case studies – of young men in a college fraternity in northern Virginia, women in Pittsburgh, and migrant groups in Sydney – to suggest that stance motivates variation patterns that have social meaning. As Kiesling stresses, it is important that any explanation of variation ‘goes beyond a mere restatement of correlational patterns’ (190), and his study represents a fruitful methodological advance in the investigation of style and identity in variation analysis.

This shift away from static correlational models of identity is endorsed by Mary Bucholtz in ‘From stance to style: Gender, interaction, and indexicality in Mexican immigrant youth slang’. She notes that

In her chapter, Bucholtz charts the use of one linguistic marker, the slang güey (often translated as dude) amongst Mexican immigrant adolescent boys in Southern California, and in media advertisements. Her analysis shows stance as the primary discursive mechanism by which style, and thence an important element of social identity, is realised.

Justine Coupland & Nikolas Coupland's chapter, ‘Attributing stance in discourses of body shape and weight loss’, broadens the discussion of stance and identity with their observation that ‘some stancetaking has acute sociocultural significance when we are dealing with stances that are … clearly hooked into wider social discourses and ideologies’ (228). Their examination of the discourse of body shape and weight loss in both a spoken corpus of geriatric doctor–patient interactions and lifestyle magazines reveals how stance attribution is a discursive resource with which to propose the normativity of a particular position; like Irvine, they show that personal stances are not necessarily within the individual's control.

Coupland & Coupland's finding that stance attribution plays a key role in the dissemination of normative ideologies is one of three contributions which explore the links between stance and wider social and linguistic ideologies. In their chapter, ‘Taking an elitist stance: Ideology and the discursive production of social distinction’, Adam Jaworski & Crispin Thurlow highlight the inherently ideological significance of stance in their view of stancetaking as ‘activating or actualising particular aspects of ideology’ (221). Their discourse analysis of travel articles in two British newspapers shows how an elitist stance is constructed, in the process revealing social difference. Alexandra Jaffe's own chapter, like Jaworski & Thurlow's, explicitly places ideology at the centre of her consideration of ‘Stance in a Corsican school: Institutional and ideological orders and the production of bilingual subjects’. She observes how the use of Corsican in the school is explicitly linked with an ideological agenda to address the power imbalance between Corsican and French, and to promote and legitimate the minority language.

Jaffe's chapter is representative of the volume as a whole in its use of stance as a mediating concept between linguistic forms and social identity; this surely moves the sociolinguistic study of identity in an innovative and productive direction. The main danger on the horizon, however, is that stance comes untethered from its proper moorings in rigorous analysis, and becomes a vacuous catch-all term with no explanatory power. In any discussion of identity there remains the vexed issue of how any element of social identity may be warrantably invoked by use of a linguistic form. The ways by which speakers index positions and claim identities are by no means always direct. The most promising interactional work in this vein, disappointingly not mentioned in this volume, is Raymond & Heritage (Reference Raymond and Heritage2006), which shows how speakers claim primary rights to make assessments, in this particular case about their grandchildren, so indexing themselves as grandparents. The methodological point here is that the observations about how speakers index identity emerged not from an initial focus on identity per se, but from work on another topic – the groundbreaking study (Heritage & Raymond Reference Heritage and Raymond2005) of how speakers index positions of primary or secondary epistemic authority vis-à-vis coparticipants. The critical resource in such cases is sequential position: any speaker in receipt of a turn is bequeathed a set of options, in that sequential position, with which to construct a response. Take a two-part exchange, consisting of assessment and agreement. Given an assessment, say, ‘It's a nice day’, a second speaker can choose to agree in a variety of ways. As Heritage & Raymond show, there is a world of difference interactionally between ‘Yes, it is’ as a response and ‘It is, yes’. While the former constitutes an agreement and a confirmation, the latter prioritises confirming over agreeing. In doing so, the speaker can propose that she held this position prior to and independently of her coparticipant (Heritage & Raymond Reference Heritage and Raymond2005: 23), despite being in the position of having to respond to their assessment, and she thus indexes her primary rights to assess the referent. Confirmation plus agreement is but one of a number of means by which speakers subvert the default ordering by which a speaker making a first assessment thereby claims primary rights to make that assessment. Across a number of examples in a variety of sequential contexts, Raymond & Heritage show how one speaker indexes her primary right to assess her grandchildren, thus positioning herself as a grandparent. Identity work is thus accomplished, not via direct markers (such as is proposed for güey, for instance) but by indices of epistemic stance. And while ‘grandparent’ emerges from Raymond & Heritage's data as the salient, oriented-to category, it is evident that such markers of epistemic authority and subordination are a generic resource for identity marking; after an excellent meal in a pub the other day, my remark to my friend, ‘This is a lovely place’ was met by ‘It is, isn't it’ – no overhearer could have failed to work out who in that context was host and who, guest.

Such work shows the reflexive relationship between the resources available to speakers and sequential position. The latter provides a set of parameters within which resources can be used to implement particular activities. Jaffe, in the introduction, nods to work in this area by noting the emergent qualities of stance in interaction (8). However, no chapter in this volume specifically addresses the issue of how sequential position may be harnessed in the marking of stance. An important contribution to the field is thereby missed. So, too, is a related methodological point, in showing how work in one apparently unrelated domain can be used to lever open another.

That said, the volume provides plenty of food for thought. It is impressively wide-ranging in scope and a compelling demonstration of the potential of stance as a way of gaining analytic traction on some of the more elusive notions in sociolinguistics. As such, it is an admirable – and refreshing – contribution to the literature.