2.1.1 Previous semantic categories of authorial st...
This part will thoroughly review various theoretical categories about authorial stance,considering different linguistic concepts which could express personal feelings and status of knowledge.
2.1.1.1 Attitudinal authorial stance
Authors express their personal feelings and attitudes to form their attitudinal stance.In a broad sense,affect in Ochs & Schieffelin’s(1989)study refers to the feeling,moods,dispositions,and attitudes associated with persons and/or situations.Ochs & Schieffelin(1989)present a general framework for understanding affect in language,rather than in nonlinguistic areas such as facial expressions and body gestures.They take affect as the umbrella term of emotion and attitude rather than the source of the information and the evaluations of knowledge.
Furthermore,they(Ochs & Schieffelin,1989:15)propose a term called“affect key”,which indexes that“an affective frame or a process of affective intensification is in play”.Affect keys could express anger,sarcasm,disappointment,sadness,pleasure,humor,or surprise,gentleness,etc.,and it may operate on a referent,a proposition or a sequence of proposition.In their research(Ochs & Schieffelin,1989),two kinds of affect markers are identified:the affect markers which indicate the intensity of an utterance and those which specify a particular attitude or emotion.The linguistic resources used to express affect across languages could be pronouns,reflexives,determiners,mood,tense/aspect,verb voices,case markings,number/gender/animacy markings,reduplication,intonation,voice quality,sound repetition,word order,affective speech acts,etc.
In Besnier’s(1990:420)research,affective meaning is considered as the“encoding of the speaker’s emotions,which the interlocutor decodes in verbal messages by giving precedence to intentionality”.He(Besnier:1990)interprets affect from both psychological and linguistic perspectives,and focuses on the semiotic status of affective meaning,as well as the relationship between affect and social situation,gender and social structure.According to Besnier(1990),affect exists in different cultures,in the form of either verbal or non-verbal expressions.Typical verbal expressions rich in affective meanings are intonation,ideophones,onomatopoeias,exclamations,expletives,interjections,curses,insults,and imprecations.In particular,affective meaning can also be conveyed by such communicative activities as laughing and weeping.
Besnier(1990:421-428)draws a analyzing framework in which typical verbal expressions in English,adverbs like obviously,plainly,and allegedly,hedging(e.g.perhaps,sort of,loosely speaking),intensity(e.g.very,really),as well as discourse markers(e.g.well,you know)all encode affective stance.Emotion words(e.g.address terms,kinship terms,pronouns)and lexical processes(e.g.synecdoche and metonymy)could also express affect.What’s more,many syntactic features such as various ways of constructing negative clauses,the transitivity valency of clauses,and active-passive alternatives are all exploited for affective purposes.At the convergence of affective and poetic dimensions of language,genres,speech-act types,and performance styles can be affectively charged.
In China,the scholars also pay much attention to the significance of affect in different kinds of expressions(e.g.,verbal or non-verbal)and in the writings of different languages(e.g.,English,Russian).Wang(王伯浩,2000)presents an interpretive analysis of the expletives used in various types and situations and by different genders,attempting to indicate the semantic and pragmatic functions of expletives in conversations.Liu(刘世铸,2009)provides a comparatively new approach to the typology of the semantics of affect based on its distribution in the data drew from the Bank of English.Apart from the research of affective expressions in English,Chinese scholars also focused on other languages such as Russian(e.g.,李元厚,2000;杨家胜,2002;杨利芳,2012).
2.1.1.2 Epistemic authorial stance
According to Gary & Biber(2012),epistemic authorial stance mainly concerns with the assessments of the status of knowledge.Actually speaking,evidentiality is a typical and influential linguistic concept which expresses epistemic authorial stance.
Broadly speaking,evidentiality refers to“the status of the knowledge contained in propositions”(Gray & Biber,2012:16).Chafe(1986:262)divides the scope of evidentiality into the narrow type and the broad type.The former concerns the source of information and is irrelevant with the epistemological relationship of the information to the speaker/writer;the latter is about the expression of the speaker/writer’s subjective relationship to the information they express.According to Chafe(1986:261-272),there are four major components of attitudes towards knowledge:the degree of reliability of knowledge,the source of knowledge,the manner in which the knowledge is acquired and the appropriateness of the verbal resources for marking evidential meaning.Similarly,Mushin(2001:52)considers epistemical stance as the speakers’opinions of how they acquired the information and how they know it.The markers of evidentiality are so various that reporting verbs such as see,feel,hear,projective clause complexes such as it demonstrated that...,modal verbs such as can,may,must,adverbs such as apparently,seemingly all could express evidentiality.
In China,Fang(2005)firstly approaches evidentiality based on Halliday’s(1994)model and Martin’s(2005)appraisal theory.Tang(2007)studies the discourse features of English evidentiality in news reports.Yang(2009)analyzes evidentiality on the discursive and genre level and establishes a three-dimensional interpersonal model based on SFL.
2.1.1.3 Both of AAS and EAS
Actually speaking,most researches of authorial stance cover both attitudinal and epistemic dimensions.This kind of study has been approached under a range of terminologies,including stance,metadiscourse,modality,appraisal theory,and evaluation.
Biber & Finegan(1988,1989)combines evidentiality and affect together into a broader model of stance,encompassing the speaker’s or the writer’s personal attitude or his/her judgement of the knowledge.According to Biber & Finegan(1989:95),personal attitude could be positive or negative while the assessment of knowledge could indicate a level of certainty or doubt.
In Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English(henceforth LGSWE),Biber et al.(1999)enlarge and develop the framework and group the stance markers into three semantic categories:epistemic stance,attitudinal stance and style stance.Epistemic stance markers present the speakers’comments on the status of information in a proposition(Biber et al.,1999:972).They could mark certainty(or doubt),actuality,precision,or limitation.In their explanation,relevant stance markers are adverbials such as definitely,in fact,sort of;modal verbs in extrinsic sense such as can,may;stance noun+prepositional phrases such as a real possibility;verb+complement clauses such as the tend to exceed in Example(1);adjective+complement clauses such as be certain that in Example(2);verb/adjective+extraposed complement clauses such as it seems that in Example(3);and noun+complement clauses as the fact that in Example(4).
(1)Sheaths at the base tend to exceed the length of the internodes.(Biber et al.,1999:972)
(2)We can be certain that the differentiation of the division of labour inevitably produces a decline.(Biber et al.,1999:972)
(3)Indeed it seems that girls very quickly replaced boys at this task.(Biber et al.,1999:972)
(4)This results from the fact that it is so difficult to distinguish deterministic chaos from highly random behaviour.(Biber et al.,1999:972)
Attitudinal stance markers report attitudes,evaluations,personal feelings or emotions(Biber et al.1999:974).Fortunately in Example(5)expresses the speaker’s attitudes while happy in Example(6)shows the speaker’s positive feelings.
(5)Fortunately this did not stop the women from trying.(Biber et al.,1999:974)
(6)I was happy to see them again.(Biber et al.,1999:974)
Style stance markers express the speaker/writer’s comments on the communication itself(Biber et al.,1999:975).Stance adverbials are the primary grammatical devices such as honestly in Example(7).
(7)Honestly,I’ve got no patience whatsoever.(Biber et al.,1999:975)
Besides the three semantic categories of stance markers,the attribution of stance is also illustrated in LGSWE(Biber et al.,1999).Explicit attribution of stance represents that the speaker/writer is explicit and the readers could directly find the source of the information.Person pronouns could make the attribution overt.Comparatively,in implicit attribution of stance,the speaker/writer is not explicitly identified.Biber et al.(1999)claim that modal verbs,adverbials and many complement clause constructions could regularly reflect this characteristic.
Apart from stance,the cover term metadiscourse is firstly coined by Harris(1959)and then the scholars gradually enlarge its scope to study the interpersonal function of metadiscourse.The research of metadiscourse starts from the study of oral discourse(Rossiter,1974;Keller,1979;Schiffrin,1980)and transmits to the study of written discourse(Myer,1975;Lautamatti,1978;Williams,1981;Vande,1985;Crismore,1989;成晓光,1997).
Due to the diversity and vagueness of this concept,the scholars are pushed to study it from various perspectives.Some great contributions are made by Crismore(1983,1989),Crismore & Farnsworth(1989,1990),Mao(1993),Mauranen(1993),Vande(1985,2002),Hyland(1998a,1999a,2000,2005),Adel(2006),etc.Among them,Hyland’s(1996,1998a,1998b,1999,2000,2005)extensive interpretation of metadiscourse is very much in line with the current research of authorial stance.
As a text-forming mechanism,metadiscourse is significant in writing.Hyland(2000)considers metadiscourse as the interpersonal devices used to organize a text or to express the author’s stance towards either its content or the readers.According to him(Hyland,2000:136-139),metadiscourse is recognized as an essential approach of promoting communication,supporting a writer’s opinions,and establishing a relationship with the audiences and interactive resources and interactional resources are two types of resources in metadiscourse.Interactive resources allow the authors“to manage the information flow to explicitly establish their preferred interpretations”(Hyland,2000:138).In the dimension of interactive resources,there are transition markers,frame markers,endophoric markers,evidentials,and code glosses.Based on Hyland’s(2005)classification and interpretation,transition markers function to express semantic relation between main clauses,and the typical examples are in addition,but,thus,and.Frame markers refer to discourse acts,sequences,or text stages with the typical examples such as finally,in conclude,my purpose is.Endophoric markers,such as noted above,see Figure X,in section 2,refer to information in other parts of the text.Evidentials refer to the source of information from other texts,such as according to X,(Y,1990),Z states.Code glosses such as namely,such as,e.g.,in other words help readers grasp meanings of ideational material.
Comparatively,interactional resources focus on“the participants of the interaction and seek to display the authors’persona and a tenor consistent with the norms of the disciplinary community”(Hyland,2000:139).According to his interpretation,hedges,boosters,attitude markers,self mention and engagement markers belong to the category of interactional resource.Specifically,based on the explanation of Hyland(2000:139),hedges function to withhold writer’s full commitment to proposition.Modal expressions such as might,perhaps,possible are typical grammatical realizations of hedges.Boosters could emphasize force or author’s certainty in proposition such as in fact,it is clear that.Attitude markers such as unfortunately,surprisingly could express writer’s attitude proposition.Engagement markers explicitly refer to the build relationship with readers,the typical examples are consider that,you can see that.Self-mention markers such as I,we,my,our represent explicit reference to authors.
Among these resources,Hyland(2005:178)sets up a writer-oriented interactive model which refers to the approaches the scholars annotate their texts to comment on the possible accuracy or credibility of a claim,the extent they want to commit themselves to it,or the personal feelings they want to convey to an entity,a proposition,or the reader.That is to say,Hyland’s model of metadiscourse combines both the evidentiality and personal attitude.It is worth noting that Hyland(2000)points out the importance of the role of CMs in the interaction between the writers and the audiences.Conjuncts such as but,and,adverbials such as subsequently,first,therefore could be encoded with interpersonal meanings.They are interactionally motivated,contributing to the creation and maintenance of shifting interpersonal orientations.
In SFL,the system of stance is not systemically established.Nevertheless,Halliday(1994)and Halliday & Matthiessen(2004)put forward the concept of modality,which reveals some enlightenment to analyze the concept of authorial stance.There are four dimensions of modality:modality type,value,polarity and orientation.According to Halliday& Matthiessen(2004:150),modalization and modulation are two basic types of modality.Modalization refers to the exchange of information in terms of probability(how likely it is to be true)or usuality(how frequently it is true),while modulation refers to the exchange of goods and services in terms of obligation and inclination.
In terms of value,modality can be sub-divided into three degrees:high,median and low(Halliday & Matthiessen,2004:148).They are useful labels in investigating the question of the speaker’s modal commitment,which is adopted by Thompson(2004:69)to describe the degree to which the speaker/writer commits himself/herself to the validity of what he/she is saying.Apart from modal types and modal value,the polarity of modality is also of great importance.In Halliday & Matthiessen’s(2004:149)interpretation,modality is gradable between positive and negative poles.When referring to the negation,we should be clear that whether it is the negation of the modality or the proposition.
Modal orientation,or modal responsibility,as Thompson(2004:70)proposes,represents how far the speaker overtly accepts the responsibility for the attitude being expressed.According to Halliday & Matthiessen(2004:620),there are four dimensions of modal orientation:explicit subjective orientation,implicit subjective orientation,implicit objective orientation and explicit objective orientation.Specifically,for the explicit subjective orientation,the speaker/writer is the source of the modal judgement.For the implicit subjective orientation,the speaker/writer as the source of the modal judgement is implicitly expressed by a finite modal operator.For the implicit objective orientation,the speaker/writer is moved away from the modal judgement implicitly through modal Adjuncts and the expansion of the Predicator.For the explicit objective orientation,it is obviously stated that the modal assessment is unrelated to the speaker.
Other distinguished researchers on modality are Palmer(1986)and Bybee & Fleischman(1995).Palmer(1986)delineates the various types of modality into propositional modality and event modality.He mentions a lot more about evidential markers and connects evidentiality with types of speech-reporting,and distinguishes it carefully from epistemic modality(the speaker’s judgement about the factual status of an assertion).Bybee & Fleischman(1995)discuss modality from four perspectives:agent-oriented and epistemic modality;interactional basis of modality;irrealis modality and the subjunctive;modality and other categories of grammar.
The orientation of modality is also applied by many Chinese scholars for analyzing media discourse and academic discourse.Yang(杨信彰,2006)compares and analyses the distribution of English central modals in legal and academic texts with a corpus-assisted approach and aims to show that central modals have their own ways of distribution in different text types and could express specific modal meanings.Shen(申丽霞,2007)comments on the modal system,especially modal space,modal types,modal commitment and modal orientation.Zhang(张曼,2008)collects 400 linguistic abstracts and analyzes the modal commitment and responsibility in academic discourse.
According to Martin & White(2005:35),appraisal represents the resource construing interpersonal meaning.Building on the traditional concepts of affect and epistemic modality,appraisal encompasses three interacting domains-attitude,engagement and graduation.Based on their interpretation,attitude is concerned with our affect,including emotional reactions,judgements of behaviour and appreciation of things.Engagement,with monoglossic system and heteroglossic system as its two types,deals with the ways in which the source of attitudes such as projection,modality,concession position the author by quoting or reporting,denying,opposing,admitting and so on.Graduation,which is divided into force and focus,is defined as“a kind of grading phenomena whereby feelings are amplified and categories blurred”(Martin & White,2000:35).Force could be realized by“intensification,comparative and superlative morphology,repetition,and various graphological and phonological features”(Martin & White,2000:37),while focus is realized by sharpening or softening the core and peripheral types of things.An overview of appraisal system in illustrated in Figure 2.1.
Figure 2.1 An overview of appraisal system(Matin & White,2005:52)
According to Martin & White(2000:67),lexical metaphor could be used to provoke an attitudinal response in readers.Non-core vocabulary which infuses intensity is less provocative but still indicates that an evaluation is being invoked.What’s more,graduation is the resource which naturalizes evaluation,especially when attitude is not explicitly inscribed.
Figure 2.2 Strategies for inscribing and invoking attitude(Martin & White,2005:67)
Thus,the various methods for inscribing and invoking attitude introduced above are outlined in Figure 2.2.Inscribed attitude is realized by explicit evaluative lexis;while invoked attitude could be provoked by lexical metaphor,flagged by graduation and afforded by ideational meaning.Martin & Hood(2007)explore the role of graduation in producing the invoked attitude in academic discourse and admit that the speaker/writer is implying the evaluation when scaling meanings.Hood(2010)enlarges the expansion of the system of graduation when explaining its effect in analyzing the inscription and invocation of the attitude.Since the 1990s,when the project“Write it right”starts,appraisal is used to study various types of discourse:history,art,textbooks,literature,popular science,etc.Hood(2004,2010)applied appraisal to the study of research articles and doctorial dissertations.
In China,Zhu(朱永生,2009)examines the significance and realization of implicit evaluation from the ideational perspective so as to prove the importance of implicit evaluation in the further development of appraisal.He(Zhu,2009)points out two limitations of recent researches based on appraisal:one is that these researches are mainly from the interpersonal perspective but pay very little attention on ideational and textual perspective;the other is that compared with the research of explicit evaluation,implicit evaluation does not gain enough attention.
The last concept discussed in this section concerning both AAS and EAS is evaluation.Hunston and his colleagues(Hunston,1994,Hunston & Thompson,2000;Hunston & Sinclair,2000)are particularly influential in this part.They use the superordinate name evaluation to cover all the semantic categories which could express the epistemic stance and attitudinal stance.According to Hunston & Thompson(2000),evaluation is the general term for the expression of the speaker/writer’s attitude or stance towards,viewpoint on,or feelings about the entities or propositions that he or she is talking about.Based on the interpretation of Hunston & Thompson(2000:22-26),there are four parameters of evaluation:good-bad(value in Hunston,1994),certainty(status in Hunston,1994),expectedness,and importance(relevance in Hunston,1994),among which good-bad parameter is dependent on the valuesystem underlying the text;parameter of certainty presents the degree of possibility or certainty towards the proposal or proposition;parameter of expectedness represents how obvious the certainty of the writer is to the reader,or expected by the reader,and parameter of importance is considered as part of the discourse itself that is evaluated as important,directing the reader towards the main point of the text.
2.1.1.4 Brief summary
Based on the above illustration,there are three semantic categories of authorial stance.AAS,EAS and both.In each of the semantic category,there are one or more theoretical constructs which are closely related.AAS is typically represented by the concept of affect in the researches of Ochs & Schieffelin(1989)and Besnier(1990).EAS is represented by the research of evidentiality(Chafe,1986;Mushin,2001;Fang,2005;Tang,2007;Yang,2009).Stance(Biber & Finegan,1988,1989;Biber et al.,1999),metadiscourse(Harris,1959;Hyland,1996,1998a,1998b,1999,2000,2005;Yang,2007),modality(Palmer,1986;Halliday,1994;Bybee & Fleischman,1995;Halliday & Matthiessen,2004;Thompson,2004;),appraisal(Martin & White,2000;Martin& Hood,2007;Hood,2010),and evaluation(Hunston,1994;Hunston & Sinclair,2000;Hunston & Thompson,2000)all contribute to our understanding of the ways in which the authors encode both AAS and EAS.
The categories mentioned above all reinforce a basic distinction between epistemic meanings and attitudinal meanings.However,there are still some deficiencies.For example,evidentiality only focuses on the source of the information;while the research of affect only focuses on the author’s attitude.The study of the grammatical resources which could realize stance are restricted to the adverbial expressions in spoken texts.The review of metadiscourse is of great help to the study of authorial stance,especially the relevant researches of Hyland(1996,1998a,1998b,1999,2000,2005)which focus much on the role of CMs in the interactive resources.Modality and appraisal are both thoroughly interpreted in the theoretical basement of SFL.When dealing with linguistic realizations,the researches of modality lay emphasis on the grammatical devices while appraisal mainly focuses on lexical devices.
A common deficiency about all the above semantic categories is that they pay less attention to the interaction between the authors and the readers.If the authors want to express their stance clearly and precisely,they should focus on the expectation of the readers.That is to say,authorial stance can be considered as an act in which both of authors and readers should engage in.
In this dissertation,authorial stance is used to encompass the common features of the above reviewed semantic categories:AAS and EAS.Furthermore,it is also related with the interaction between the authors and the readers.The essence of authorial stance is the interaction.Hoey(2001)mentions clearly that text does not exist except as part of a commitment to interaction in which each contributor’s needs should be met and the needs of others should be respected.In the EAPs,every author has a certain kind of reader in mind and that kind of reader then comes to the text and accepts what the author offers.Charles et al.(2009:110)point out that academic writing is usually distinguished by its apparent absence of explicit stance expressions.However,it is clearly structured to evoke affinity and engagement(Hyland,2004;Swales,2004).In their academic work,the authors should also adopt interactional and evaluative positions,anticipate the readers’expectations and responses to make a dialogue with them.That is to say,it is necessary to examine discourse in terms of the authors’projection of the perceptions,interests and needs of potential audience(Charles et al.,2009).Discourse analysts have sought to elaborate the ways by which such interpersonal projection are expressed,and to propose various linguistic concepts to define the projection.
There are quite a few researches on the authorial stance,concerning the author-reader interaction.Pho(2008)aims at exploring not only the rhetorical moves of abstracts in the fields of applied linguistics and educational technology,but also the linguistic realizations of moves and authorial stance in different abstract moves.Hsu(2012)explores authorial stance in attribution hedges in Chinese academic discourse and their disciplinary variation.Chang(2010,2012),Chang & Schleppegrell(2011)and Chang & Tsai(2013)focus on the research of the daunting challenges of authorial stance-taking in research writing for L2 writers.In China,Du(2004)analyzes how medical writers overtly intrude into their writing through first person pronouns and how they modify their assertions through modal expressions,and finds out whether there are any differences between Anglo-American and Chinese medical professionals concerning their use.