Discourse stance: Written and spoken language

The aim of this article is to integrate findings reported in the preceding articles in this collection, employing a global discourse perspective labeled discourse stance. The paper attempts to clarify what is meant by this notion, and how it can contribute to the evaluation of text construction along the major variables of our project: Target Language (Dutch, English, French etc.), Age (developmental level and schooling), Modality (writing vs. speech), and Genre (personal experience narratives vs. expository discussion). We propose a general conceptual framework for characterizing discourse stance as a basis for an empirically testable potential model of this key aspect of text construction and discourse analysis. Unlike the cross-linguistically data-based studies reported in the rest of this collection, which involve quantitative as well as well as qualitative analyses, this concluding article presents selected pieces of text from our sample to serve as case studies that illustrate our general line of reasoning, rather than to test specific hypotheses.