Abstract

Stance is inherent in conversational interaction and is interactional in nature. When speakers take a stance, they pay attention to both prior stances and stance relations, as well as to the anticipated consequences of their stancetaking. They manage stance relations as a way of dealing with the “sociocognitive relations” of intersubjectivity. Using the dialogic framework proposed by Du Bois, this paper shows that the discourse marker well in American English works as a resource for the management of relationships among stances. With its referential and grammatical flexibility, it is uniquely characterized as a meta-stance marker because, rather than indexing a specific stance, it negotiates and regulates stance relations. Well is analyzed in two contextual categories: first, at stance divergence among utterances, and second, at stance shifts embedded in topic shift.