A Study On Stance Expression In Spoken English From The Perspective Of Metapragmatics

Stance is the overt expression of an author’s or speaker’s personal feelings,attitudes,value judgments,or assessments towards a proposition(Biber & Finegan,1988).When people use language,apart from communicating propositional content,we also inevitably express stance(Biber et al.,1999).Stance meanings can be expressed in many ways,including grammatical devices,word choice,and paralinguistic devices(Biber et al.,1999: 966).In spoken English,the speaker will choose different ways to reflect his/her own stance,which would reflect the speaker’s metapragmatic awareness,however,there are few studies that have explored the use of stance expression from the perspective of metapragmatic awareness so far.Aiming to fill this gap in the current research,this dissertation seeks to carry out research in order to examine stance expression used in spoken English.This study takes quantitative and qualitative analysis methods and collects the scripts of the first five seasons of the American television show Modern Family as the corpus.With Biber et al.’s(1999)classification of stance marking as the standard and a group of stance markers that are most frequently used in spoken English listed by Carter& Mc Carthy(2006)as the reference,the study firstly describes the features of the first ten frequently used stance expressions in the corpus.Based on the results,by adopting the three forms of metapragmatic awareness proposed by Culpeper & Haugh(2014)as the theoretical foundation,the present study takes a further discussion of stance expression from the metapragmatic perspective,examining how those three types of metapragmatic awareness are represented by the use of stance expression.The study aims to answer two questions:(1)What are the linguistic features of stance expression in spoken English?(2)How do speakers use stance expression to represent metapragmatic awareness in different dimensions?This study shows that stance expression has the positional freedom to occur in multiple positions in an utterance,including initial,medial and final position.stance expression most commonly occurs in the initial and medial positions rather than the final position.It is most common for stance expression to occur in the initial and medial positions in an utterance.Stance expression used in the final position has been found to occur the least.All the ten stance expressions discussed in this study have found to be able to occur in the initial and medial positions.In terms of the collocational features,the results show that stance expression has the flexibility to be used independently or collocate with other words.This study discovers four types of vocabulary including adjectives,nouns,verbs and conjunctions that can collocate with stance expression in an utterance,and the study has discovered that there are collocational differentiations when it comes to collocate with different types of vocabulary.From the metapragmatic perspective,it shows that stance expression used in spoken English can represent the speaker’s different types of metapragmatic awareness,namely,metacognitive awareness,metarepresentational awareness and metacommunicative awareness.By adopting stance expression,the speaker can reflect his/her own feelings,intentions or attitudes toward a proposition or manage and adjust the conversational content.Furthermore,based on the results of positional and collocational features,the study discovers that the linguistic features of the same stance expression have the potential to show certain differentiations when it’s used to represent different dimensions of metapragmatic awareness.This study has both theoretical and practical importance.Theoretically speaking,the study carries out a research of stance expression from a challenging perspective,offering new insights into the use of stance expression.Also,the new research perspective provided by this study could serve as reference for future research.Practically speaking,the results of the study could enhance English learners’ communication efficiency and pragmatic competence.They could be conducive to help English learners improve their understanding of the use of stance expression and also enable them to use stance expression in a proper way while having a conversation.