“Hypophora” and “question cascade” in Cantonese political discourse: the stance triangle and the use of rhetorical moves and utterance final particles
-
Helen Wan
Helen Wan received her PhD in East Asian Linguistics from University of California, Los Angeles and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pepperdine University. Her research interests include political discourse, identity construction, gesture analysis and gender studies. Her dissertation is titled “
A Multimodal Approach to the Discursive Construction of Stances of Political Debates in Hong Kong ”.
Abstract
This paper looks into the specific pragmatic functions of Cantonese utterance final particles (UFPs) employed in a televised political debate, hosted by the Television Broadcasts Limited in 2016. The paper explores the most frequently used UFPs and discusses how they are being manipulated with two prominent questioning strategies, i.e., hypophora and question cascade, to help project negative stance in this highly institutionalized discourse genre. With the aid of the theoretical framework of ‘stance triangle’, I investigate how various stance-taking activities are navigated through the employment of two questioning strategies as well as UFPs to establish dis-alignment among the electoral candidates. The findings show that the most frequently used UFPs are le1 and aa3: these two UFPs are relatively neutral in question design in daily conversation and are used in all types of question such as polar questions, alternative questions, and content questions. The findings demonstrate that these particles serve as a mitigator and softener with the strategic use of hypophora and question cascade. This paper also proposes a revised stance triangle that helps understand how the negative stances are navigated in questioning strategies and realize the stance objects in an explicit manner. Discovering the true stance objects reveals that the question designs are usually oriented to the “remote audiences,”i.e. the voters.
About the author
Helen Wan received her PhD in East Asian Linguistics from University of California, Los Angeles and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pepperdine University. Her research interests include political discourse, identity construction, gesture analysis and gender studies. Her dissertation is titled “A Multimodal Approach to the Discursive Construction of Stances of Political Debates in Hong Kong”.
Appendix: List of abbreviations
- ADV
-
adverbial marker
- CL
-
noun classifier
- LP
-
linking particle
- PFV
-
perfective aspect
- PRT
-
particle
- UFP
-
utterance final particle
References
Chan, Marjorie K. M. 2002. Chinese: Gender-related use of sentence-final particles in Cantonese. In Marlis Hellinger & Hadumod Bussmann (eds.), Gender across languages: The linguistic representation of women and men, vol. 2, 57–72. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/impact.10.08chaSuche in Google Scholar
Chor, Winnie. 2018. Sentence final particles as epistemic modulators in Cantonese conversations: A discourse-pragmatic perspective. Journal of Pragmatics 129. 34–47. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2018.03.008.Suche in Google Scholar
Clayman, Steven E. 1988. Displaying neutrality in television news interviews. Social Problems 35(4). 474–492. https://doi.org/10.2307/800598.Suche in Google Scholar
Clayman, Steven E. 1992. Footing in the achievement of neutrality: The case of news interview discourse. In Paul Drew & John Heritage (eds.), Talk at work: Interaction in institutional encounters, 163–198. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Suche in Google Scholar
Clayman, Steven E. & John Heritage. 2002. Questioning presidents: Journalistic deference and adversarialness in the press conferences of U.S. president Eisenhower and Reagan. Journal of Communication 52(4). 749–775. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2002.tb02572.x.Suche in Google Scholar
Clayman, Steven E., Marc N. Elliott, John Heritage & Laurie L. McDonald. 2006. Historical trends in questioning presidents, 1953-2000. Presidential Studies Quarterly 36(4). 561–583. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-5705.2006.02568.x.Suche in Google Scholar
Clayman, Steven E., Marc N. Elliott, John Heritage & Laurie L. McDonald. 2007. When does the watchdog bark? Conditions of aggressive questioning in presidential news conferences. American Sociological Review 72(1). 23–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/000312240707200102.Suche in Google Scholar
Clayman, Steven E., Marc N. Elliott, John Heritage & Megan K. Beckett. 2010. A watershed in White House journalism: Explaining the post-1968 rise of aggressive presidential news. Political Communication 27(3). 229–247. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2010.496712.Suche in Google Scholar
Clayman, Steven E. & Matthew P. Fox. 2017. Hardballs and softballs: Modulating adversarialness in journalistic questioning. Journal of Language and Politics 16(1). 19–39. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.16.1.02cla.Suche in Google Scholar
Du Bois, John W. 2007. The stance triangle. In Robert Englebretson (ed.), Stancetaking in discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction, 139–182. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/pbns.164.07duSuche in Google Scholar
Hayano, Kaoru. 2013. Question design in conversation. In Jack Sidnell & Tanya Stivers (eds.), The handbook of conversation analysis, 395–414. Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.10.1002/9781118325001.ch19Suche in Google Scholar
Heritage, John. 2002. The limits of questioning: Negative interrogatives and hostile question content. Journal of Pragmatics 34(10–11). 1427–1446. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0378-2166(02)00072-3.Suche in Google Scholar
Heritage, John. 2008. Constructing and navigating epistemic landscapes. The Journal of Studies in Contemporary Sociological Theory 2. 14–25.Suche in Google Scholar
Heritage, John C. & Andrew L. Roth. 1995. Grammar and institution: Questions and questioning in the broadcast news interview. Research on Language and Social Interaction 28(1). 1–60. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327973rlsi2801_1.Suche in Google Scholar
Islam, Aang Fatihul, Dian Anik Cahyani & Ika Lusi Kristanti. 2018. Stylistics features in personal essay of English department’s student. Journal of English Education, Linguistics and Literature 2(2). 1–5. https://doi.org/10.32682/jeel.v2i2.844.Suche in Google Scholar
Kwok, Helen. 1984. Sentence particles in Cantonese. Hong Kong: Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong.Suche in Google Scholar
Leung, Chung Sum. 1992. A study of the utterance particles in Cantonese as spoken in Hong Kong. Hong Kong: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Unpublished M.Phil thesis.Suche in Google Scholar
Leung, Ester & John Gibbons. 2011. Interpreting Cantonese utterance-final particles in bilingual courtroom discourse. Interpreting Chinese, Interpreting China 29. 81–105. https://doi.org/10.1075/bct.29.06leu.Suche in Google Scholar
Linell, Per. 2009. Rethinking language, mind and world dialogically: Interactional and contextual theories of human sense-making. Charlotte, North Carolina: Information Age Publishing.Suche in Google Scholar
Linell, Per, Johan Hofvendahl & Camilla Lindholm. 2003. Multi-unit questions institutional interactions: Sequential organizations and communicative functions. Text 23(4). 539–571. https://doi.org/10.1515/text.2003.021.Suche in Google Scholar
Luke, Kang Kwong. 1990. Utterance particles in Cantonese conversation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/pbns.9Suche in Google Scholar
Matthews, Stephen & Virginia Yip. 2011. Cantonese: A comprehensive grammar. London: Routledge.Suche in Google Scholar
McCormick, Samuel. 2003. Earning one’s inheritance: Rhetorical criticism, everyday talk, and the analysis of public discourse. Quarterly Journal of Speech 89(2). 109–131. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630308176.Suche in Google Scholar
Sacks, Harvey, Gail Jefferson & Emanuel A. Schegloff. 1992. Lectures on conversation, vol. 1 and 2. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.Suche in Google Scholar
Tolson, Andrew. 2012. “You’ll need a miracle to win this election” (J. Paxman 2005): Interviewer assertiveness in UK general elections 1983–2010. Discourse, Context and Media 1(1). 45–53. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2012.05.003.Suche in Google Scholar
Zeyrek, Deniz, Amália Mendes & Murathan Kurfali. 2018. Multilingual extension of PDTB-style annotation: The case of TED multilingual discourse bank. In Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Koiti Hasida, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis & Takenobu Tokunaga (eds), Proceedings of the 11th language resources and evaluation conference (LREC) 2018, 1913–1919. Miayazaki, Japan: European Language Resources Association.Suche in Google Scholar
© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Guest Editorial
- Editorial
- Research Articles
- Stancetaking in motion: stance triangle and double dialogicality
- The use of animal classifiers as a stance negotiation strategy in Cantonese interactional discourse
- Questioning Chinese government officials on a live broadcast TV program: shifted second-person pronouns and journalists’ stance and identity
- “Hypophora” and “question cascade” in Cantonese political discourse: the stance triangle and the use of rhetorical moves and utterance final particles
- On the face-threat attenuating functions of Korean com: implications for internal and external dialogic processing in interaction
- Divergence in uncertainty: the Korean non-committal suffix -(u)lkel
- Epilogue
- Epilogue: commentary on stancetaking in motion
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Guest Editorial
- Editorial
- Research Articles
- Stancetaking in motion: stance triangle and double dialogicality
- The use of animal classifiers as a stance negotiation strategy in Cantonese interactional discourse
- Questioning Chinese government officials on a live broadcast TV program: shifted second-person pronouns and journalists’ stance and identity
- “Hypophora” and “question cascade” in Cantonese political discourse: the stance triangle and the use of rhetorical moves and utterance final particles
- On the face-threat attenuating functions of Korean com: implications for internal and external dialogic processing in interaction
- Divergence in uncertainty: the Korean non-committal suffix -(u)lkel
- Epilogue
- Epilogue: commentary on stancetaking in motion
