Meaning in interaction:
The use of abstract nouns and the co-construction of stance in conversation
Chester Chen-Yu Hsieh
Graduate Institute of Linguistics,
National Taiwan University, Taiwan
Abstract
The current study aims to demonstrate how the use of a Chinese abstract noun,
yisi ‘meaning, intention’, contributes to the conversation participants’ negotiation andco-construction of stance in interaction. As many researchers have rightly put forth,the idea of stance should be regarded as stancetaking, a dynamic, interactional andco-constructing process or activity, rather than a given, fixed standpoint (Du Bois2007; Kärkkäinen 2006; Lempert 2008; Scheibman 2007; Wu 2004, among others).
Instances of different grammatical categories that can index stance, such ascomplement-taking predicates, modal auxiliaries, adverbials and the like, have beenwell-discussed in the past literature (Biber and Finegan 1989; Englebretson 2007;
Kärkkäinen 2003, 2006, 2007, Wu 2004, to name a few). However, the stancetaking
function of nouns in conversation has seldom been addressed (see Charles 2003 for a
discussion on the stance-constructing function of nouns in English academic writing).
The current research intends to fill the gap by a case study on the use of a Chinese
abstract noun, yisi ‘meaning, intention’, in conversation.
With the spoken data from three corpora, National Taiwan University (NTU)
Mandarin Corpus, the Spoken Mandarin Corpus of NTU Cognitive Pragmatics Lab(NTU CoPra) and the NCCU Corpus of Spoken Chinese, we find that the use of yisi islargely related to the stancetaking act of the participants in conversation. Furthermore,both the speaker and the hearer can make use of the abstract noun, along with variousco-occurring formulaic expressions or grammatical structures, to achieve different
pragmatic and interpersonal functions. On the one hand, for the speaker, yisi can serveas an elaborating or clarifying marker, specifying his perspective on particularmessages and/or refining or realigning his previous statement. On the other hand, theaddressee can also utilize the noun either to show his understanding, saving thespeaker’s positive face (Brown and Levinson 1987), or to express his difficulty inunderstanding, forcing the speaker to elaborate more on his statement and therebyparticipating in the negotiation of meaning and the establishment of stance inconversation.
This study is thus important in two ways. First, it advances our understanding of
the mechanism of stancetaking in conversation, corroborating the idea that stance isboth dynamic and intersubjective. Second, it identifies the interpersonal functions ofabstract nouns in conversation, a finding that can hardly be obtained by studies basedon written data (cf. Charles 2003; Francis 1994; Schmid 2000, among others).
Keywords: stancetaking, abstract nouns, Mandarin Chinese, intersubjecivity
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