Cover not available
Article published In:
Media Language and Discourse in Cultural China
Edited by Doreen D. Wu, Ming Liu and David C.S. Li
[Chinese Language and Discourse 13:1] 2022
► pp. 79–98

Stancetaking in Hong Kong political discourse

A corpus-assisted discourse study

ORCID logo | The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
This study gives a corpus-assisted discourse study (CADS) of stancetaking in the public speeches of three former Chief Executives. Three large corpora have been built by collecting all the public speeches of the three former Chief Executives. It combines automatic semantic tagging with the tripartite analysis of stancetaking in terms of evaluation, positioning and (dis)alignment. The findings not only reveal their preferential ways of stancetaking but also the changing socio-political contexts behind their particular ways of stancetaking. It is argued that a combination of the methods and theories in critical discourse analysis, stancetaking, and corpus linguistics can generate more illuminating findings concerning stancetaking in political discourse.
Keywords: stancetaking, political discourse, Hong Kong, public speeches, Chief Executive, critical discourse analysis, corpus-assisted discourse study (CADS)
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Research background
  • 3.Stance in political discourse analysis
  • 4.Methodology
  • 5.Findings
    • 5.1Analysis of evaluation
    • 5.2.2Analysis of (dis)alignment
    • 5.2.3Analysis of positioning
  • 6.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 29 March 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cld.21001.liu
References
Baker, P.
(2006) Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. London and New York: Continuum. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baker, P., Gabrielatos, C., KhosraviNik, M., Krzyżanowski, M., McEnery, T., & Wodak, R.
(2008) A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press. Discourse & Society, 19 (3), 273–306. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bednarek, M.
(2006) Evaluation in Media Discourse: Analysis of a Newspaper Corpus. London and New York: Continuum.Google Scholar
Biber, D.
(2006a) Stance in spoken and written university registers. Journal Of English for Academic Purposes, 5 (2), 97–116. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2006b) University Language: A Corpus-based Study of Spoken and Written Registers (Vol. 231). New York: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biber, D., & Finegan, E.
(1989) Styles of stance in English: Lexical and grammatical marking of evidentiality and affect. Text, 9 (1), 93–124.Google Scholar
Chafe, W. L., & Nichols, J.
(Eds.) (1986) Evidentiality: The linguistic coding of epistemology (Vol. 201). Norwood: Ablex.Google Scholar
Cheng, W.
(2013) Corpus-based linguistic approaches to critical discourse analysis. In C. Chapelle (Ed.), The encyclopedia of applied linguistics (pp. 1353–1360). West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Chilton, P.
(1996) Security Metaphors: Cold War Discourse from Containment to Common House. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
(2004) Analysing political discourse: Theory and practice. London and New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cienki, A., & Giansante, G.
(2014) Conversational framing in televised political discourse: A comparison from the 2008 elections in the United States and Italy. Journal Of Language And Politics, 13 (2), 255–288. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Connor-Linton, J.
(2014) Author’s style and worldview: A comparison of texts about American nuclear arms policy. In S. Conrad & D. Biber (Eds.), Variation in English: Multi-Dimensional Studies (pp. 84–93). Harlow: Pearson Education.Google Scholar
Conrad, S., & Biber, D.
(2000) Adverbial marking of stance in speech and writing. In S. Hunston & G. Thompson (Eds.), Evaluation in text: Authorial stance and the construction of discourse (Vol. 561, pp. 56–73). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Du Bois, J. W.
(2007) The stance triangle. In R. Eaglebreston (Ed.), Stancetaking in discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction (Vol. 1641, pp. 139–182). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Elder, C.-H.
(2020) Trump vs. Clinton: Implicatures as public stance acts. In L. N. Berlin (Ed.), Positioning and stance in political discourse: The individual, the party, and the party line (pp. 71–91). Malaga: Vernon Press.Google Scholar
Englebretson, R.
(2007) Stancetaking in discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction (Vol. 1641). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fairclough, N.
(1989) Language and Power. New York: Longman.Google Scholar
(1992) Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge and Oxford: Polity PressGoogle Scholar
Fetzer, A.
(2014) I think, I mean and I believe in political discourse: Collocates, functions and distribution. Functions Of Language, 21 (1), 67–94. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Flowerdew, J.
(2004) Identity politics and Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty: Analysing the discourse of Hong Kong’s first chief executive. Journal Of Pragmatics, 36 (9), 1551–1578. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Furko, P.
(2017) Manipulative uses of pragmatic markers in political discourse. Palgrave Communications, 3 (1), 1–8. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haddington, P.
(2004) Stance taking in news interviews. SKY Journal of Linguistics, 17 1, 101–142.Google Scholar
Halliday, M. A. K.
(1994) An Introduction to Functional Grammar (2nd ed.). London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Haselow, A.
(2020) Expressing stance in spoken political discourse – The function of parenthetical inserts. Language Sciences, 101334. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hidalgo-Downing, L.
(2008) The expression of writer stance by modal adjectives and adverbs in comparable corpus of English and Spanish newspaper discourse. In A. M. Hornero, M. J. Luzón, S. M. Ornat, & S. Murillo (Eds.), Corpus Linguistics: Applications for the Study of English (pp. 125–140). Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Hidalgo-Downing, L., & Hanawi, Y.
(2017) Bush and Obama’s addresses to the Arab world: Recontextualizing stance in political discourse. In K. Aijmer & D. Lewis (Eds.), Contrastive Analysis of Discourse-pragmatic Aspects of Linguistic Genres (pp. 187–209). New York: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ho, S. Y. E., & Crosthwaite, P.
(2018) Exploring stance in the manifestos of 3 candidates for the Hong Kong Chief Executive election 2017: Combining CDA and corpus-like insights. Discourse & Society, 29 (6), 629–654. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hunston, S.
(2006) Truth and lies: The construction of factuality in a television documentary. In C. R. Caldas-Coulthard & M. T. Toolan (Eds.), The Writer’s Craft, the Culture’s Technology (pp. 181–194). Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
Jaffe, A.
(2009) Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Johnstone, B.
(2009) Stance, style, and the linguistic individual. In A. Jaffe (Ed.), Stance: sociolinguistic perspectives (Vol. 291, pp. 52). Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lempert, M.
(2009) On ‘flip-flopping’: Branded stance-taking in US electoral politics. Journal Of Sociolinguistics, 13 (2), 223–248. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Liu, M., & Zhong, J.
(2020) Between national and local: Identity representations of post-colonial Hong Kong in a local English newspaper. Discourse, Context & Media, 36 1, 100401. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marín-Arrese, J. I.
(2013) Stancetaking and inter/subjectivity in the Iraq Inquiry: Blair vs. Brown. In J. I. Marín-Arrese, M. Carretero, J. Arús Hita, & J. van der Auwera (Eds.), English modality: core, periphery and evidentiality (pp. 411–445). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2015) Epistemicity and stance: A cross-linguistic study of epistemic stance strategies in journalistic discourse in English and Spanish. Discourse Studies, 17 (2), 210–225. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Martin, J. R., & White, P. R.
(2005) The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Morley, J., & Bayley, P.
(Eds.) (2009) Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies on the Iraq Conflict: Wording the War. New York and London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Partington, A.
(2004) Corpora and discourse, a most congruous beast. In A. Partington, J. Morley, & L. Haarman (Eds.), Corpora and Discourse (pp. 11–20). Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Partington, A., Duguid, A., & Taylor, C.
(2013) Patterns and Meaning in Discourse: Theory and Practice in Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rayson, P.
(2008) From key words to key semantic domains. International Journal Of Corpus Linguistics, 13 (4), 519–549. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thompson, G., & Hunston, S.
(2000a) Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
(2000b) Evaluation: An introduction. In S. Hunston & G. Thompson (Eds.), Evaluation in text: Authorial stance and the construction of discourse (pp. 1–27). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Tsui, E.
(2012) Leung wins Hong Kong election. Financial Times. Retrieved from [URL]
Van Dijk, T. A.
(2005) War rhetoric of a little ally: Political implicatures and Aznar’s legitimatization of the war in Iraq. Journal Of Language And Politics, 4 (1), 65–91. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
van Dijk, T. A.
(2008) Discourse and Power. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Veg, S.
(2017) The rise of “localism” and civic identity in post-handover Hong Kong: Questioning the Chinese nation-state. The China Quarterly, 230 1, 323–347. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wang, B., & Feng, D.
(2018) A corpus-based study of stance-taking as seen from critical points in interpreted political discourse. Perspectives, 26 (2), 246–260. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wodak, R.
(1989) Language, Power and Ideology: Studies in Political Discourse (Vol. 71). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2016) The discourse-historical approach. In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of critical discourse analysis (3rd ed.). London: Sage.Google Scholar
Wodak, R., & Meyer, M.
(Eds.) (2016) Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Wong, M. Y. H.
(2017) Comparative Hong Kong Politics: A Guidebook for Students and Researchers. New York: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wong, S. H.-W.
(2015) Electoral Politics in Post-1997 Hong Kong. New York: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wu, D. D., Huang, Y., & Liu, M.
(2015) Competing and hybridized discourses in Chinese news reporting: case studies of three key newspapers in Southern China. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 10 (1), 67–84. DOI logoGoogle Scholar