A Comparative Study On Stance Markers Functions Of English And Chinese Adverbial Conjunctions In High-End TV Debates Discourse

Discourse stance has long been a hot topic in linguistic research,but relatively few studies have examined the role of adverbial conjunctions(hereafter ACs)as stance markers in stance construction and stance expression.Based on the corpus of high-end TV debate discourse,this thesis establishes stance ACs classification framework based on Biber’s stance marker theory and Du Bois’ stance triangle theory,making ACs one of the linguistic strategies for stance construction and stance expression.By comparing the frequency distributions,cooccurrence patterns and sequence environments between English and Chinese ACs in stance construction,the differences between their stance acts and stance-taking functions are examined.Additionally,the pragmatic motivations and interactional properties behind these differences are discussed.Thus,the similarities and differences in the stance-marking functions of English and Chinese ACs are further summarized.Firstly,the stance construction of English and Chinese stance ACs shows that: 1.In terms of frequency distributions,English stance ACs appear more frequently and are more prominent than Chinese ones in the realization of stance meaning,and this difference is related to the length of the turn.2.In terms of cooccurrence patterns,English and Chinese epistemic,attitude and style stance ACs can cooccur with other words,including modal particles,conjunctions,prepositions,personal pronouns,and other categories of stance ACs.3.In terms of the sequence environments,English stance ACs mostly appear at turn-initial as interactive resources to reset the conversation or initiate a new topic sequence;Chinese attitude and style ones are mostly found in turn-medial to continue,preempt the turn or prevent the hearer from stance disaligning;Chinese stance ACs at turn-final are significantly less used than the English ones,which is related to the difference in spoken language syntactic structures between English and Chinese.Secondly,the stance expression of English and Chinese stance ACs shows that: 1.In terms of stance act,both English and Chinese stance ACs can realize the act of stance alignment and stance disalignment.Influenced by low-context culture,English epistemic and style stance ACs are mostly used to directly manifest the judgments on propositions,focusing on “words”.In contrast,Chinese,as a high-context culture language,tends to use attitude stance ACs to present affective and evaluation implicitly,focusing on “meaning”.2.In terms of stance-taking functions,English stance ACs mainly serve to expand the discourse scope and enhance discourse participation,while Chinese stance ACs are usually employed to adjust stance and avoid face-threat.3.In terms of the reasons,English and Chinese ACs’ stance-marking functions can be attributed to the violation of the Cooperative Principles and Politeness Principle in pragmatic motivations,and the dynamic emergence in subjectivity and intersubjectivity in interactional properties.Through the specific analysis of the stance marking functions of English and Chinese ACs in high-end TV debates,we can better understand their stance construction potential and stance-taking functions.At the same time,this study could also be a reference for other registers in stance analysis,such as classroom discourse,doctorpatient discourse,and TV interviews,as well as a source of inspiration for the study of English and Chinese ACs and the study of discourse stance.