affective stances can be communicated through different parts of speech?

[xujiajin]

I am transferring your post as a new thread to invite more focused discussions.

I'm thinking about using corpus linguistic methodology coupled with discourse analysis to investigate problems relating to the interaction and grammar, specifically how affective stances can be communicated through different parts of speech as a Ph.D. dissertation. Naturally this would involve spoken data as opposed to the usually used written corpus, because alignment of affective or epistemic stances is one of the primary work done in everyday talk.

I would love to hear what teachers around here think about this. Thank you.

 

[xujiajin]

回复: affective stances can be communicated through different parts of speech?

Even if you have observed some systematic interaction b/t affective stance marking and grammatical categories, this still does not make a good research question. For instance, you have to answer what accounts for the interaction, say, the high correlation between certain POS or construction and specific type of stance in speech. There may well be linguistic reasons, like prosody; cognitive-functional reason (e.g. pragmaticalization) and so forth.

In everyday speech or conversation, if you stay closer to it, you might find both alignment and misalignment of epistemic and affective stance are common.

 

[UCLA_Lim]

回复: affective stances can be communicated through different parts of speech?

Sorry, I think I may not have frame my thinking accurately in my previous post.

Yes, alignment and misalignment of stances are common in everyday interaction, hence evidencing the normality of stance display in talk. Para-linguistic means such as gestures, facial expression and phonetic components such as prosody, pitch and stress all contribute to the work of such stance display in talk.

However, it is conceivable that in the absence of these known practices, affective stances are still quite salient. For example, in telephone conversation where gestural and facial display are not available.

I do not think that any particular grammatical category is devoted to the work of different stance-display (maybe with the exception of interjections), but within particular word classes, such as intensifiers, certain items maybe more prone to be primed for stance-display, and the instantiation of these items may communicate the speaker's stance. This maybe evidenced by their higher count in spoken corpus as opposed to the written corpus.

I guess, I'm just thinking about some of the primary differences between written and spoken registers, and the subjective display of speaker's stance seems to be one of them. This leads me to consider how these stances maybe communicated in everyday speech besides para-linguistic means.

If we are to accept lexical priming as a viable theory central to corpus linguistic, wouldn't certain lexical items frequently used in emotive conversational interaction also theoretically be 'primed' to display emotive stances?

This is just some of my initial thoughts....still seeking a viable dissertation topic....Thank you for your valuable comments.