The use of animal classifiers as a stance negotiation strategy in Cantonese interactional discourse
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Ariel Chan
Ariel Chan is a PhD candidate in East Asian Linguistics at University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests lie in bilingualism, heritage language acquisition, cultural identity, and socio-pragmatics of grammatical particles in Sinitic languages. Specifically, her dissertation examines how sociocultural, cognitive, and linguistic factors interact with one another in bilingual processing.
Abstract
This study adopts the idea of ‘stance triangle’ and ‘double dialogicality’ and examines the use of animal classifiers for human referents in the stance negotiation process in Cantonese. Drawing on the data from a Corpus of Mid-twentieth-century Hong Kong Cantonese, this study explores how participants deploy two animal classifiers (i.e., tiu4, a classifier for fish, and zek3, a classifier for animal) to express their negative stance towards another person. The present study specifically analyzes three examples where the relationships between the stance subjects (SS1-SSn) and stance objects (O) are different: O is present in the interaction in one instance, and absent in the other two instances. My analysis suggests that upon the display of negative stance towards O by the original stance subject, other stance subjects can deny the ‘joint attention’ to avoid establishing any alignment link with the original stance taker as a way of negotiating their stance. I propose an extended model of ‘stance triangle’ which better captures the fluidity and dialogicality in the stance negotiation process.
About the author
Ariel Chan is a PhD candidate in East Asian Linguistics at University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests lie in bilingualism, heritage language acquisition, cultural identity, and socio-pragmatics of grammatical particles in Sinitic languages. Specifically, her dissertation examines how sociocultural, cognitive, and linguistic factors interact with one another in bilingual processing.
Appendix A: Transcription conventions
| → | Target line |
| @ | Laughter |
| ， | Continuative pitch movement |
| . | Terminative pitch movement |
| ! | Appeal final pitch movement |
| ^ | Primary accent |
| : | Prosodic length (lag) |
| ? | Question |
| (.) | Micro-pause |
| (1.0) | Measured pause of approximately 1 s |
| ((XX)) | Comment |
Appendix B: Abbreviation of glosses
| 1SG | First person singular |
| 2SG | Second person singular |
| 3SG | Third person singular |
| ASP | Aspect particle |
| CL | Classifier |
| EXCL | Exclamative particle |
| INT | Intensifier |
| INTJ | Interjection |
| PFV | Perfective marker |
| POSS | Possessive |
| PREP | Preposition |
| PRT | Particle |
| PX | Prefix |
| Q | Question particle |
| SFP | Sentence final particle |
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© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- 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
Articles in the same Issue
- 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
