Stance-taking In Reporting Of Chinese Interview Conversation

Stance in discourse has become a research hotspot in recent years and has drawn much attention from the academic community.As a common linguistic phenomenon in human communication and one of the important strategies for stance-taking,reporting is often accompanied by multimodal resource features.However,according to the literature review,most of the studies on Chinese reporting are limited to written texts,and there are few studies on stance-taking in reporting,and few scholars pay attention to how interactive participants display their stances with multimodal resources in the reporting process of actual verbal communication.Interactions between people are multimodal,and conversation in the interview is one of the common modes of interaction,in which participants often use multimodal resources to complete the reporting behavior and achieve the purpose of interaction.Therefore,based on the gaps of previous studies,taking the multimodal interaction as the perspective,and conversations in the Chinese interview program A Date with Luyu as the corpus,this study explores stance-taking in reporting behavior,and aims to answer three research questions:(1)In the Chinese interview conversation,what stances are mainly displayed by interactive participants in the process of reporting?(2)how do the interactive participants employ multimodal resources to display different stances in the process of reporting?(3)What role do prosodic features and bodily-visual conducts play in displaying stances in the process of reporting?It is found that,firstly,in the Chinese interview conversation,through the act of reporting,participants can not only display their own stances,but also convey the stances of the reported person.Among them,the epistemic stance of the reporter is the most frequently used one,since the special language structure of reporting itself is a way to display epistemic stance.Stance-taking in the act of reporting is not separate,multiple stances may be displayed in a single act of reporting.Then,regarding the reporting type of the reported person’s view,three kinds of stances can be displayed through multimodal coordination.First,prosodic features are coordinated with reported information to define the boundary of the reported information,and to indicate the source of the reported information;and the coordination of reported information and bodily-visual conducts can supplement the content of the presentation stage of reporting,reflecting the reporter’s understanding of the reporting so that the reporter’s epistemic stance is displayed.Second,evaluative reported information combined with bodily-visual conducts or prosodic features simultaneously displays the evaluative stance of the reported person on an object and that of the reporter on the reported content.Third,bodily and prosodic resources can also be operated with affective reported information to display the reported person’s affective stance.While in the type of reporting that views are unlimited,disaffiliative stance of the speaker can be displayed by the coordination of gaze shift with evaluative reported information that is inconsistent with the other participant’s evaluation,which mitigates the contradiction in the interaction.Finally,multimodal resources are closely related to stance-taking.The prosodic features and bodily-visual conducts in the process of reporting play a role of indicating stance,enhancing the degree of stance,and reflecting the authenticity of stance-taking.This study enriches related researches on stance,reporting and Chinese multimodal interaction,filling the gaps of the studies on stance-taking in reporting behavior under the perspective of multimodal interaction.Moreover,the main findings of this study also deepen people’s understanding of the communication strategy reporting and the multimodality of stance-taking in discourse,which also exhibits a certain significance for the reporting users and stance takers in interviews,daily conversations and other interactive forms.