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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
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