A Study On The Expression Of Negative Evaluative Stance In Modern Chinese

Stance-taking is an important part of communication.Evaluation is a basic function of interaction.Evaluating the rationality of a certain behavior or an event expresses an evaluative stance,which constitutes the basic content of daily communication.The criteria of rational evaluation are reasons,which can be roughly divided into two types:normative reasons and requirement reasons.At the level of language expression,these two kinds of criteria of rational evaluation are packaged as relational reasons,which includes causal connection,relevance connection and magnitude connection.Thus,evaluative stances can be divided into three types: causal evaluative stance,related evaluative stance and magnitude evaluative stance.Speakers can express their evaluative stances based on the causal relations among behaviors or events,the relations between behaviors with other factors and the sequence of magnitude so as to ensure the rationality of their evaluation.In verbal Chinese communication,the speakers can use various language resources including rhetorical questions,specific constructions,lexico-grammatical features and rhyme schemes to express negative evaluative stances.With respect to speech strategy,there are direct evaluation and indirect evaluation.Declaring a fact with a specific tone is a kind of explicit strategy of indirect evaluation.In terms of the expression of negative causal evaluative stance,speakers can disprove the rationality of result from the perspective of cause.On the other hand,the rationality of cause also can be negated from the perspective of result.Besides,there are two expression models: causal construction and causal reconciliation,under which corresponding language forms can be choosed by speakers and the exchange of evaluative perspectives and expression models under specific contexts can be realized.The expression of negative related evaluative stance is to evaluate the affairs from the perspective of the matching correlation between behavioral activities and relevant factors such as behavior time,behavior subject identity(or type),behavior mode,etc.,mainly with the help of some specific constructions or sentence patterns to highlight mismatch between a behavior and its associated factors to achieve a negative expression of the behavior or behavior mode,etc.The expression of negative magnitude evaluative stance is to place the behavioral situation in the order of magnitude,and evaluate its rationality from the perspective of whether the behavioral situation conforms to the order of magnitude.For instance,the words referring to magnitude significance like “hai” and “lian” are used to connect the low end of the magnitude.The speakers can express negative evaluative stances with such methods as analyzing the contrast between the low possibility of proposition and the factualness of proposition and deducing the contrast between proposition and reality,which forms the prerequisite extreme magnitude evaluative stance and magnitude deduction evaluative stance correspondingly.In general,the expression of negative evaluative stance not only depends on the language form itself,but also closely related to a series of factors such as the sequence of speech(including sequence type and sequence position),the knowledge status of both parties,and pragmatic reasoning.It not only affects the recipient’s recognition of the social behavior undertaken by the discourse and the communicative function achieved,but also leads to multiple interpretations of social behavior and the derivation of the discourse function.