Adjectival Marking of Stance in Twitter: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis of Saudi Women's Tweets on Social Reforms

Writers and speakers use various linguistic techniques to convey their stances. Researchers have shown significant interest in studying these methods over the years. With the rise of social media, it is anticipated that examining how writers express their stances on Twitter and other social media platforms can provide valuable insights, particularly on contentious issues, such as social reforms and women's empowerment. Accordingly, the present study employed a corpus-assisted discourse studies approach to analyse a 5,265-tweet corpus to understand how Saudi women perceive the recent social reforms in their country and how they use adjectives to convey their stances on these reforms. The study's key findings indicated that Saudi women generally view the reforms positively and tend to use evaluative specifically laudatory adjectives more frequently than attitudinal ones to express their support for these changes. The results reveal that laudatory adjectives function as prominent stance markers in social media discourse, supporting their inclusion as a distinct subcategory of evaluative stance markers within this register. These findings have implications for future research, suggesting that analysing linguistic structures in social media can offer valuable insights into the stances of social media users and can be informative for policymakers involved in social reforms.