Chapter 7
Understanding stancetaking through gestures and linguistic practices in a
public political debate in Hong Kong
Hong Kong has enjoyed partial universal suffrage in both
District Council election as well as the Legislative Council election since the
handover in 1997. This paper looks into the 2016 Hong Kong Legislative Council
electoral debate with the combination of discourse analysis using the Stance
Triangle (Du Bois 2007) and
gesture-unit analysis (Kendon 2004) to
study how verbal and non-verbal activities are being strategically organized to
project both affective and epistemic stances by the elected incumbent, Alvin
Yeung, and his opponents. The findings suggest Cantonese utterance final particles
and gestures are strategically and aptly employed to achieve both expressive and
communicative purposes in the political debates where they can not only elucidate
their policy agenda but also defeat the opponents and win the votes.
Article outline
- Background of the study
- Methodology
- Gesture analysis
- The status of gestures in human interaction
- Gesture units, gesture phrases, the phases of gestural action
- Stancetaking and the stance triangle
- The stance triangle
- Affective and epistemic stances
- Data
- Findings
- Individual Speech
- Analyzing the individual speech with the Stance Triangle
- Interim summary for stancetaking in individual speech
- The debate between Alvin Yeung and Holden Chow
- Analyzing the debate with the Stance Triangle
- Interim summary for the debate
- Conclusion
-
Acknowledgements
-
Notes
-
References