Delving into suggestion speech acts in Chinese authoritative academic discourse
A cognitive pragmatic perspective
This paper aims to examine the realisation of suggestions in authoritative academic discourse through the lens of
cognitive pragmatics. To date, the majority of academic suggestion research has focused on face-to-face interactions in an
institutional context. However, other forms of suggesting, namely the written forms of academic suggestions have not yet been
sufficiently explored. Thus, there is a knowledge gap when it comes to authoritative academic suggestions directed to policy
makers. Such policy maker-directed suggestions are always bound and embedded in particular cultural contexts. As a case study, we
explore the suggestions in authoritative academic discourse with the focus on illocutionary force indicating devices (IFIDs) and
relevant construal strategies. Our data were drawn from the Blue Book of Ecological Governance (China Ecological
Governance development report 2019–2020), an important manifestation of authoritative academic discourse in China.
The findings indicate that three types of IFIDs are deployed to delimit Chinese authoritative academic suggestions, among which
conventionalised and indirect IFIDs are preferred. Notably IFID tools pertain to speakers’ choices of construal strategies for
building up the infrastructure of suggestions. The operation of these strategies reveals how authoritative academic suggestions
are internally coded, as well as how they are built to externally act on. Furthermore, we argue that the speakers’ choices of
construal strategies imply a degree of politeness. The study may shed light upon speech act and politeness research in Chinese
linguaculture.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Literature review
- 2.1Suggestions
- 2.2Academic suggestions
- 2.3Pragmatic strategies
- 3.Analytic framework
- 4.Data and method
- 5.Analysis
- 5.1IFIDs
- 5.2The construal strategies
- 5.2.1Explicitness
- 5.2.2Perspectivity
- 6.Conclusions
- Acknowledgements
-
References
References (68)
References
Alston, William P. 1994. “Illocutionary Acts and
Linguistic Meaning.” In Foundations of Speech Act Theory:
Philosophical and Linguistic Perspectives, ed. by Savas L. Tsohatzidis, 29–49. London/New York: Routledge.
Austin, John L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words: The
William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in
1955. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Austin, Paddy. 1990. “Politeness
Revisited – The Dark Side.” In New Zealand Ways of Speaking English, ed. by Allan Bell, and Janet Holmes, 277–293. Clevedon/Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters.
Bach, Kent, and Robert M. Harnish. 1979. Linguistic
Communication and Speech Acts. Cambridge/London: The MIT Press.
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four
Essays. Texas: University of Texas Press.
Banerjee, Janet, and Patricia L. Carrell. 1988. “Tuck
in Your Shirt, You Squid: Suggestions in ESL.” Language
Learning 38 (3): 313–364. 

Bardovi-Harlig, Kathleen, and Beverly S. Hartford. 1996. “Input
in an Institutional Setting.” Studies in Second Language
Acquisition 18 (2): 171–188. 

Bresnahan, Mary. 1992. “The
Effects of Advisor Style on Overcoming Client Resistance in the Advising Interview”. Discourse
Processes 15 (2): 229–247. 

Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness:
Some Universals of Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Christensen, Johan. 2018. “Economic
Knowledge and the Scientization of Policy Advice.” Policy
Sciences 51 (3): 291–311. 

DeCapua, Andrea, and Lisa Huber. 1995. “‘If
I Were You…’: Advice in American
English.” Multilingua 14 (2): 117–132. 

Dinsmore, John. 1991. Partitioned
Representations. Dordrecht: Springer. 

Fauconnier, Gilles. 1985. Mental
Spaces: Aspect of Meaning Construction in Natural Language. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Reprinted 1994, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gibbs, Raymond W. 1980. “Spilling the Beans on
Understanding and Memory for Idioms in Conversation.” Memory &
Cognition 8 (2): 149–156. 

Gillingham, Philip. 2019. “From
Bureaucracy to Technocracy in a Social Welfare Agency: A Cautionary Tale.” Asia Pacific Journal
of Social Work and
Development 29 (2): 108–119. 

Gizzi, Michael C., and Stefan Rädiker, eds. 2021. The
Practice of Qualitative Data Analysis: Research Examples Using
MAXQDA. Berlin: MAXQDA Press.
Goldsmith, Daena J. 2004. Communicating Social
Support. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Goldsmith, Daena J., and Kristine Fitch. 1997. “The
Normative Context of Advice as Social Support.” Human Communication
Research 23 (4): 454–476. 

Gu, Edward, and Merle Goldman. 2004. “Introduction:
The Transformation of the Relationship between Chinese Intellectuals and the
State.” In Chinese Intellectuals between State and
Market, ed. by Edward X. Gu, and Merle Goldman, 1–18. London: Routledge. 

Graumann, Carl F., and Michael C. Sommer. 1988. “Perspective
Structure in Language Production and Comprehension.” Journal of Language and Social
Psychology 7 (3–4): 193–212. 

Edmondson, Willis J., and Juliane House. 1981. Let’s
Talk, and Talk about It: A Pedagogic Interactional Grammar of
English. München: Urban & Schwarzenberg.
Hámori, Ágnes. 2010. “Illocutionary
Force, Salience and Attention Management – A Social Cognitive Pragmatic Perspective.” Acta
Linguistica
Hungarica 57 (1): 53–74. 

He, Shanhua, and Tiaoyuan Mao. 2020. “Can
the Research on Language Planning Be Also Planned?: Recent Academia-Government Interactions In
China.” Current Issues in Language
Planning 21 (4): 434–453. 

Henricson, Sofie, and Marie Nelson. 2017. “Giving
and Receiving Advice in Higher Education. Comparing Sweden-Swedish and Finland-Swedish Supervision
Meetings.” Journal of
Pragmatics 1091: 105–120. 

Higuchi, Koichi. 2016. KH
Coder 3 Reference Manual. Kioto (Japan): Ritsumeikan University.
Hyland, Ken. 2005. “Stance
and Engagement: A Model of Interaction in Academic Discourse.” Discourse
Studies 7 (2): 173–192. 

Hyland, Ken. 2011. “Academic
Discourse.” In Continuum Companion to Discourse
Analysis, ed. by Ken Hyland, and Brian Paltridge, 171–184. London: Continuum.
Jackson, Peter M. 2007. “Making Sense of Policy
Advice.” Public Money and
Management 27 (4): 257–264. 

Kuckartz, Udo. 2014. Qualitative
Text Analysis: A Guide to Methods, Practice and Using
Software. London: Sage. 

Kuno, Susumu. 1987. Functional
Syntax: Anaphora, Discourse and
Empathy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, George. 1987. Women,
Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the
Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 

Langacker, Ronald W. 1990. “Subjectification.” Cognitive
Linguistics 1 (1): 5–38. 

Langacker, Ronald W. 1994. Concept, Image and
Symbol. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Langacker, Ronald W. 2001. “Discourse in Cognitive
Grammar.” Cognitive
Linguistics 12 (2): 143–188. 

Langacker, Ronald W. 2008. Cognitive Grammar: A Basic
Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Li, Eden Sum-hung. 2010. “Making Suggestions: A
Contrastive Study of Young Hong Kong and Australian Students.” Journal of
Pragmatics 42 (3): 598–616. 

Li, Qun, and Fawen Yu. 2019. Blue
Book of Ecological Governance. Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press.
Liu, Fengguang, Shi, Wenrui, and Yaochen Deng. 2019. “A
Contrastive Study of Chinese and American Political Speech Act of Advising – Taking Diplomatic Discourse as an
Example.” Foreign Language
Education 401: 44–50.
Marín-Arrese, Juana I. 2011. “Epistemic Legitimizing
Strategies, Commitment and Accountability in Discourse.” Discourse
Studies 13 (6): 789–797. 

Martínez-Flor, Alicia. 2005. “A
Theoretical Review of the Speech Act of Suggesting: Towards a Taxonomy for Its Use in
FLT.” Revista Alicantina de Estudios
Ingleses 181: 167–187. 

Nuyts, Jan. 1993. “Epistemic
Modal Adverbs and Adjectives and the Layered Representation of Conceptual and Linguistic
Structure.” Linguistics 31 (5): 933–96. 

Nuyts, Jan. 2004. “The
Cognitive-Pragmatic Approach.” Intercultural
Pragmatics 1 (1): 135–149. 

Papafragou, Anna. 2000. “On
Speech-Act Modality.” Journal of
Pragmatics 32 (5): 519–538. 

Pattyn, Valérie, Sonja Blum, Ellen Fobé, Mirjam Pekar-Milicevic, and Marleen Brans. 2022. “Academic
Policy Advice in Consensus-Seeking Countries: The Cases of Belgium and Germany.” International
Review of Administrative
Sciences 88 (1): 26–42. 

Pollitt, Christopher. 2006. “Academic
Advice to Practitioners – What Is Its Nature, Place and Value Within Academia?” Public Money
and
Management 26 (4): 257–264. 

Sanders, José, and Gisela Redeker. 1996. “Perspective
and the Representation of Speech and Thought in Narrative
Discourse.” In Spaces, Worlds, and Grammar, ed.
by Gilles Fauconnier, and Eve Sweetser, 290–317. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Sbisà, Marina. 2001. “Illocutionary
Force and Degrees of Strength in Language Use.” Journal of
Pragmatics 33 (12): 1791–1814. 

Schmid, Hans-Jörg. 2012. Cognitive
Pragmatics. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. 

Searle, John R. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy
of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Searle, John R. 1976. “The Classification of
Illocutionary Acts.” Language in
Society 5 (1): 1–24. 

Sharoff, Serge, Reinhard Rapp, Pierre Zweigenbaum, and Pascale Fung. 2013. Building
and Using Comparable
Corpora. Berlin: Springer. 

Stadler, Stefanie Alexa. 2011. “Coding Speech Acts for
Their Degree of Explicitness.” Journal of
Pragmatics 43 (1): 36–50. 

Sweetser, Eve. 1990. From
Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic
Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Taguchi, Naoko, Loretta Fernández, and Yuechun Jiang. 2021. “Systemic
Functional Linguistics Applied to Analyze L2 Speech Acts: Analysis of Advice-giving in a Written
Text.” In New Directions in Second Language
Pragmatics, ed. by J. César Félix-Brasdefer, and Rachel L. Shively, 27–57. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. 

Talmy, Leonard. 1988. “Force
Dynamics in Language and Cognition.” Cognitive
Science 12 (1): 49–100. 

van Dijk, Teun A. 1977. “Pragmatic Macro-structures in
Discourse and Cognition.” Retrieved from: [URL]
Vehviläinen, Sanna. 2009. “Student-initiated
Advice in Academic Supervision.” Research on Language and Social
Interaction 42 (2): 163–190. 

Verhagen, Arie. 2007. “Construal
and Perspectivisation.” In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive
Linguistics, ed. by Dirk Geeraerts, and Hubert Cuyckens, 48–81. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Weisser, Martin. 2010. “Annotating
Dialogue Corpora Semi-automatically: A Corpus-linguistic Approach to Pragmatics.” Unpublished
Post-doctoral Dissertation, University of Bayreuth.
Wiebe, Janyce. 1990. “Identifying
Subjective Characters in Narrative.” In Proceedings of COLING
90, 401–406. Retrieved from: [URL]. 
Wu, Shuqiong, and Jing Huo. 2016. “A
Cognitive Research of No-Subject Sentences in Chinese Legislative Texts.” Foreign Language and
Literature
Studies 331: 266–271.
Zha, Qiang. 2012. “Intellectuals,
Academic Freedom, and University Autonomy in China.” In University
Governance and Reform. Policy, Fads, and Experience in International Perspective, ed.
by Hans G. Schuetze, William Bruneau, and Garnet Grosjean, 209–224. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 

Zhao, Shouhui, and Guowen Shang. 2016. “Language
Planning Agency in China: From the Perspective of the Language Academies.” Current Issues in
Language
Planning 17 (1): 23–35. 

Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
El-Dakhs, Dina Abdel Salam & Mervat M. Ahmed
2024.
The realization of the speech act of suggestion in Alexandrian and Najdi Arabic: a variational pragmatic study.
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 11:1

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 21 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.