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Pragmatics and Society: Online-First Articles

When TCM debate meets Covid-19 discourse

Identifying evidentiality in Chinese social-mediated communication

ORCID logo | Shanghai Maritime University
ORCID logo | University of Warwick
The Covid-19 pandemic has pushed medical discourse to the forefront of everyday communication, but limited scholarly attention has been given to its intersection with social-mediated language use in the Chinese context. From a corpus-pragmatic view, we examined textual data collected from Zhihu, the most popular Chinese community question-answering site. Our analysis focused on the linguistic mechanism of evidential expression in social-mediated debates on Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Within the realm of medical scientific discussion, we identified a prevailing epistemic stance of doubt and uncertainty towards the efficacy of TCM, emphasising its socio-political significance. We also demonstrated how the ‘source of knowledge’ value and the ‘speaker commitment’ value of evidentiality interact at the semantic-pragmatic interface. Our findings shed light on a promising research trajectory for sociolinguistic intervention in the formal, descriptive line of evidentiality research, thus, advancing existing corpus pragmatics literature on evidentiality and epistemics in social-mediated communication.
Keywords: evidentiality, social-mediated communication, pragmatics, traditional Chinese medicine, Covid-19
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous research on evidentiality
    • 2.1The concept and scope of evidentiality
    • 2.2Interpersonal significance of evidentiality
    • 2.3Approaching evidentiality in Mandarin Chinese
    • 3.Data and method
  • 4.Results and analysis
  • 5.Discussion and concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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