Deontic stance

Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL: Deontic stance
Author(s):	Melisa Stevanovic (Tampere University, Finland) (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0429-1672)
To cite:	Stevanovic, Melisa. (2023). Deontic stance. In Alexandra Gubina, Elliott M. Hoey & Chase Wesley Raymond (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA). DOI: []

Deontic stance refers to a participant’s publicly displayed and claimed strength of deontic rights relative to their co-participant(s) in a certain domain of action (Stevanovic 2018). While the term “stance” signifies a positioning that is achieved through overt communicative means (i.e., language, gesture, and other symbolic forms of conduct) and thus made publicly accessible to others (Du Bois 2007: 169), deontic stance is a more specific term, signifying a positioning with respect to the right to determine what is obligatory, permissible, or forbidden (Shoaps 2004, 2017).

Being focused on the rights of the participants as displayed in their overt behavior, deontic stance overlaps with the notion of entitlement (Curl & Drew 2008; Heinemann 2006). Moreover, as speakers commonly want to downgrade their overt claims of deontic rights by designing their actions is specific ways (e.g., Ong, et al. 2020), the notion of deontic stance is also related to the pragmatic notion of mitigation (Caffi 1999; 2007; Clark 1979; Flores 2020; Fraser 1980) and the politeness theoretical idea of people generally avoiding imposition (Brown 2020; Brown & Levinson 1978 [1987]; Lakoff 1973; Watts 2003).

In linguistics, deontic stance-taking has been connected with the linguistic expressions of necessity, obligation, and desirability in terms of deontic modality (Palmer 2001; Shoaps 2017). Deontic stance may thus be taken by using various modal expressions, such as the imperative mood, modal verbs and auxiliaries, or modal adverbs and adjectives (Svennevig 2021). Other specific linguistic resources serving the management of deontic stance-taking include non-anaphoric reference forms (Raymond, et al. 2021), prefatory address terms (Clayman 2013), and turn-initial particles look and listen (Sidnell 2007). This area of work applies deontics to sequence organization—to investigate the practices of negotiating proximal deontic rights to (re)direct sequences of action.

Strong deontic stance-taking may be frequently observed in signs regulating behavior in public, as exemplified by Figure 1, drawn from the study by Svennevig (2021):

Figure 1 (from Svennevig 2021: 168): Superintending Archeologist, Archeological Survey of India

In the sign in Figure 1, we find an example of a strong deontic stance with an imperative (‘do not make the monument dirty’), and an adverbial phrase (‘strictly prohibited’), which in this case involves a claim of the right to define what is forbidden (or what are those rules that a visitor is obliged to comply with).

The positions implicated in and through deontic stance-taking may be placed on a “deontic gradient” (Stevanovic 2018). Someone who wants to get her spouse to stop humming could, in principle, say one of the following utterances:

(a) You shut up right now!
(b) Would you please be quiet?
(c) I can’t hear the radio weather report.

While the command (a) involves an aggravated deontic stance, the question (b) conveys a mitigated deontic stance: the recipient’s “quietness” is presented as something that is contingent on the recipient’s choice to comply. Then again, by formulating their action as a declarative statement (c), the speaker claims a relatively weak deontic stance: it is up to the recipient to sort out the implications that the utterance has on the recipient’s actions.

Since deontic stance is also about being able to determine the actions of one’s own (Stevanovic 2018), another way of putting together a deontic gradient is the following:

(d) I’ll submit my dissertation now.
(e) Do you think that I could submit my dissertation now?
(f) When do you think that I could submit my dissertation?

In (d), where the speaker’s utterance is a declarative statement, the decision about the action in question is presented as already established, which may involve a strong deontic stance when said, for example, to one’s supervisor (as opposed to one’s mother). In (e), in contrast, where the utterance has the form of a polar question, the realization of the speaker’s plan is presented as contingent on the recipient. The speaker’s deontic stance is even weaker in (f), where the speaker produces a wh-question; it is the recipient who is invited first to articulate the appropriate plan for the first speaker.

The deontic stance that a participant takes in and through the publicly observable features of action-design may be congruent or incongruent with the participant’s deontic status (Heritage 2013; Stevanovic 2018). Heritage (2013) has suggested that there may still be a “preference” (pg. 570) for the speaker’s publicly displayed deontic stance to be congruent with their deontic status, which could at least in part account for the maintenance of social hierarchy. Still, various types of deontic incongruencies are common. One example is the first position downgrading incongruence (Stevanovic 2018), which involves the first speaker publicly displaying a low deontic stance while relying on their high deontic status to achieve the desired consequences. In the following example, drawn from a study by Henderson (2020), Mum is putting her child, Trevor, to bed and initiating a directive for Trevor to first use the toilet.

(Henderson 2020)

01  MUM:    mm b- when did you last go to the toilet.
02          (0.8)
03  TRE:    u::m
04          (8.0)
05  TRE:    forgot.
06          (1.8)
07  MUM: -> >d’you wanna go< pop your toothbrush back >and give 
08          it a try<?
09          (1.1)
10  TRE:    °u:::° >no<,
11          (0.6)
12  TRE:    °I don’t wanna (go do that).°
13          (1.8)
14  TRE:    (but) my body doesn’t feel like it nee:ds to.
15          (0.8)

Mum’s directive in line 7 displays a low deontic stance by orienting towards Trevor’s desires (line 7), which allows space for Trevor to act autonomously while also telling him what to do (on children’s ways of balancing compliance and resistance in claims of autonomy, see also Kent, 2012). Even though Trevor reciprocates Mum’s publicly displayed orientation to desire and resists the directive based on his own desire, the status of Mum’s utterance as having implied an obligation for Trevor to comply becomes apparent by the subsequent long expansion of the sequence, which ends only after Trevor has complied (see the analysis of the entire episode in Henderson, 2020: 174–185). In this sense, Mum’s deontic status trumps her deontic stance (for an analogous argument in the field of epistemics, see Heritage 2012).

While a possible preference for deontic congruence over deontic incongruence may account for the stability of social order (Heritage 2013), the incongruences between deontic stance and deontic status allow the participants to negotiate their autonomy also in those situations where they de facto end up complying with someone else’s will (Stevanovic 2018). In this sense, they contain a seed for social change, without yet overtly challenging the existing order.

Additional Related Entries:

• Deontic authority
• Deontic rights
• Deontic status
• Deontics
• Epistemics
• Epistemic status

Cited References:

Brown, P. & Levinson, S. (1978 [1987]) Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge University Press.

Brown, P. (2020). Politeness. In J. Stanlaw (Ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology.

Caffi, C. (1999). On mitigation. Journal of Pragmatics, 31, 881–909.

Caffi, C. (2007). Mitigation. Elsevier.

Clark, H. H. (1979). Responding to indirect speech acts. Cognitive Psychology, 11, 430–477.

Clayman, S. E. (2013). Agency in response: The role of prefatory address terms. Journal of Pragmatics, 57, 290–302.

Couper-Kuhlen, E. (2014). What does grammar tell us about action?. Pragmatics, 4(3), 623–647.

Curl, T. S. & Drew, P. (2008). Contingency and action: A comparison of two forms of requesting. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 41(2), 129–153.

Du Bois, J. W. (2007). The stance triangle. In Robert Englebretson (Ed.), Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction (pp. 139–182). John Benjamins.

Flores, N. (2020). Linguistic Mitigation in English and Spanish: How Speakers Attenuate Expressions. Routledge.

Fraser, B. (1980). Conversational mitigation. Journal of Pragmatics, 4(4), 341–350.

Heinemann, T. (2006). ‘Will you or can’t you?’: Displaying entitlement in interrogative requests. Journal of Pragmatics, 38(7), 1081–1104.

Henderson, G. (2020). Deontics at bedtime: A case study of participants’ resources in a directive trajectory involving a mother and her autistic child. Research on Children and Social Interaction, 4(2), 168–191.

Heritage, J. (2012). Epistemics in action: Action formation and territories of knowledge. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 45(1), 1–29.

Heritage, J. (2013). Action formation and its epistemic (and other) backgrounds. Discourse Studies, 15, 551–578.

Kent, A. (2012). Compliance, resistance and incipient compliance when responding to directives. Discourse Studies, 14(6), 711–730.

Lakoff, R. (1973). The logic of politeness: Or, minding your p’s and q’s. In C. Corum, T. C. Smith-Stark, & A. Weiser (Eds.), Papers from the 9th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (pp. 292–305). Chicago Linguistic Society.

Ong, B., Barnes, S., & Buus, N. (2020). Downgrading deontic authority in open dialogue reflection proposals: A conversation analysis. Family Process, 60(4), 1217-1232.

Palmer, F. R. (2001). Mood and Modality (2nd edition). Cambridge University Press.

Raymond, C. W., Clift, R., & Heritage, J. (2021). Reference without anaphora: On agency through grammar. Linguistics: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the Language Sciences, 59(3), 715–755.

Shoaps, R. A. (2004). Morality in grammar and discourse: Stance-taking and the negotiation of moral personhood in Sakapultek (Mayan) wedding counsels (Guatemala). KIRJA

Shoaps, R. A. (2017). Directives, moral authority, and deontic stance-taking in Sakapultek Maya. Anthropological Linguistics, 59(1), 24–70.

Sidnell, J. (2007). ‘Look’-prefaced turns in first and second position: Launching, interceding and redirecting action. Discourse Studies, 9(3), 387–408.

Stevanovic, M. (2013a). Constructing a proposal as a thought: A way to manage problems in the initiation of joint decision-making in Finnish workplace interaction. Pragmatics, 23(3), 519–544.

Stevanovic, M. (2013b). Deontic Rights in Interaction: A Conversation Analytic Study on Authority and Cooperation. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Helsinki.

Stevanovic, M. (2018). Social deontics: A nano-level approach to human power play. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 48(3), 369–389. https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12175

Stevanovic, M., & Peräkylä, A. (2014). Three orders in the organization of human action: On the interface between knowledge, power, and emotion in interaction and social relations. Language in Society, 43(2), 185–207.

Svennevig, J. (2021). How to do things with signs. The formulation of directives on signs in public spaces. Journal of Pragmatics, 175, 165–183.

Watts, R. (2003). Politeness. Cambridge University Press.

Additional References: