MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Using the main tenets of what is known as “Theory of Stance” (Du Bois 2002a, 2002b, 2004, 2007; Jaffe, 2009), with special emphasis on the ‘stance triangle’ (DuBois 2007), this presentation aims to analyze the ways in which Hispanics use linguistic, structural, and discourse resources to build their social identity in oral speech during the stance-taking process. More specifically, the presentation will examine how linguistic forms can express speakers’ “subjective stance” as a result of socialization processes, speakers’ prior histories, and contextual factors, thus establishing indexical relationships between the discourse practices speakers use and their social identity. The presentation will show how, when speakers take a stance through evaluation, positioning, and alignment, they use linguistic patters to build, negotiate, and even challenge (aspects of) their identity(ies). In order to do this, I will analyze oral testimonies from the Spanish in Texas corpus provided by the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning (COERLL) at the University of Texas at Austin. The analysis will provide data to see whether studying the construction of Hispanic identity through the stance-taking lens does in fact align with current discourses of identity construction (cf. Kallmeyer and Keim 2003; Bucholz 2005; Drager 2015, among others). The talk will finish with some considerations about the implementation of these findings in the Spanish as a Heritage Language classroom, and how they can be used to foster a positive ethnic/identity status for the students.