Pronoun TA as a facilitator of empathy in Chinese digital narratives
This article presents findings pertaining to digital you-narratives in which ungendered third person Chinese
pronoun ta is embedded. The study asks what implications the script choice ta, as opposed to gendered
他
ta ‘he’ and 她
ta ‘she’, has for the facilitation of
situational empathy when used in conjunction with specific and generic 你
ni ‘you’. The study draws on 131 digital texts from celebrity verified accounts on
social media platform Sina Weibo in October 2015. From a Discourse Analytical perspective, the study utilizes pragmatic and
textual approaches under a constructivist narrative analysis framework to examine the facilitative role of ta in relation to
empathy invoked in readers. The study proposes that ta is a pragmatic resource used to facilitate the
co-construction of emergent narratives based on situational empathy. The implications of said findings are discussed along with
future avenues of research.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Theoretical background
- 3.Data and methodology
- 3.1Main corpus and Public Figures data set
- 3.2Coding scheme
- 3.3Dataset type and dataset motivation
- 3.4Analytical methods
- 3.5Textual structure
- 3.6Illustrative example coding scheme application
- 4.Results and discussion
- 4.1Hypothetical you-narrative
- 4.2Autotelic you-narrative
- 4.3Quantitative discussion
- 5.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Note
-
References
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Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
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Non-gendered pronoun processing: an investigation of the gender non-specific third person singular pronoun ‘TA’ in Chinese.
Discourse Processes 60:8
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