Stance Markers as Politeness Realizations

A Sociopragmatic Correspondence Analysis of Noam Chomsky's Prepared Keynote Speech

Abstract

This article investigates whether stance-taking and face-management function as two separate communicative acts or as a single coordinated system in expert academic discourse. The case examined is Noam Chomsky's prepared keynote address at the 2021 ALLEA Forum, "The University at Times of Crisis." Drawing on Hyland's (2005) account of interactional metadiscourse and Brown and Levinson's (1987) account of politeness, twenty instances of four stance categories, boosters, attitude markers, hedges, and self-mentions, were located across seventeen utterances and then cross-checked against the four politeness outcomes the utterances realize. The resulting distribution is not scattered: certainty-projecting devices, boosters and most attitude markers, cluster overwhelmingly (92.3%) around the most direct, face-threatening politeness option, while mitigating devices, hedges and most self-mentions, cluster almost as tightly (85.7%) around the most face-protective option. Both departures from this pattern turn out to have a clear local cause rather than looking like noise, which strengthens rather than weakens the case for a genuine link. Read together, the results indicate that when Chomsky commits to a claim or backs away from one, he is simultaneously choosing how much interactional risk to take on, meaning epistemic stance and politeness strategy are produced by the same linguistic decision rather than two independent ones. The article argues that Hyland's (2005) framework, typically read as a theory of epistemic positioning alone, needs to be read alongside politeness theory to capture how expert speakers manage the tension between forceful public criticism and academic collegiality.