A Study Of Discourse As Social Representations In The Chinese Context

The covariation between language use and social change has long been one of the major sociolinguistic concerns. Since 1949, mainland China has witnessed several phases of great social changes. How social change brings about the variation in language use has become one of the issues that Chinese sociolinguistics is particularly interested in. The present study only focuses on how language use covaries with the change of interpersonal or social relations between the institutional authority (as well as the individual authority) and the public in the Chinese context and how social attitudes towards certain key words change over time, since the covariation between language use and social change involve many respects.The sociolinguistic research on social relations is largely focused on 'power' and 'solidarity' and mainly confined to some linguistic markers of address terms and naming. However, the ways of representing social relations in discourse, as maintained in functional linguistics and critical discourse analysis, could be myriad and usually involve various linguistic resources apart from address terms and naming.Due to the lack of existing relatively systematic and workable frameworks for probing the covariational relationship between language use and social change in sociolinguistics, one of the aims of the present study is to establish a theoreatical framework fit for dealing with the above questions. The theoretical framework established in the present study is mainly drawn from the realizational model of social context and language and the model of semiotic change in functional linguistics, but has also integrated the construct of social cognition in van Dijk's socio-cognitive approach to political discourse analysis. The analytical tools for discourse analysis are inclusive of Hasan's generic structural potential (GSP) analysis and Martin and White's (and others') Appraisal system in functional linguistics, and van Leeuwen's toolkits for the analysis of representations of social actors and social actions in critical discourse analysis. Corpus linguistic techniques such as segmentation of Chinese words, coding, concordance and keyness identification have also been employed in the study.The study, bringing together both the qualitative and quantitative approaches, makes a diachronic analysis of a genre of Chinese political discourse-58 texts of the New Year's editorials (hereafter the NYEs) (1949-2006) in the People's Daily. The NYEs have been roughly divided into three periods: 1949-1966, 1967-1978 and 1979-2006.The results of the present study attest the validity of the theoretical framework and analytical tools established in revealing diachronic change of social relations in the NYEs. The present study can provide theoretical and methodological support for other related studies of Chinese political discourse. The results also confirm that social relations are not only realized in address terms and naming, but also encoded in the representations of social actors and social actions and evaluative linguistic resources.The results of the study demonstrate that social relations between the institutional authority as well as the individual authority and the public have shifted from power asymmetry to solidarity to a large extent and the common national identity has been more prioritized so far; there has emerged a trend of what Fairclough terms discursive democratization in the NYEs.The specific findings of the study are briefly summarized as follows:Social change including the change of social relations is not only realized at the lexico-grammatical level, but also at the text level, i.e. social change is represented in generic variation, to some extent.The collectivization of the social actors in the US-group has tended to highlight the equality of all echinic groups and the common national identity. The 'repression' (in van Leeuwen's term) of some social actors in the association of the social actors in the US-group points to the fact that such social actors' power over other in-group social actors has relatively diminished. The identification of social actors has reverted from classification to functionality and demetaphorization and neutralization in the identification of social actors have occurred as well. The resources representing social actions such as deconstructive verbs and directive reporting verbs and their nominalizations have been on the sharp decrease in quantity and even have disappeared altogether.The diachronic variation in the representation of evaluation lies in the decrease of negative resources of Judgment. The positive evaluation on the in-group social actors has been increasingly represented via indirect or implicit ways, i.e. through the positive Appreciation resources.The survey of social attitudes towards political words mostly culled out of the NYEs indicates that age structuring is obvious with social attitudes towards some political words, but not obvious with other words. This suggests that some mainstream political ideologies still persist and are socially shared and that 'symbolic violence' (in Bourdieu's term) still exerts influence on social actors. On the other hand, the social values have been pluralized as a result of the change of social context. The neutralization of connotations of some political words also suggests that social context has been more loosening and harmonious.In conclusion, the study has revealed the covariation between language use and society in a systematic and multi-perspective way. One of the contributions of the study to Chinese sociolinguistics is that it has disclosed how Chinese discourse covaries with the evolution of Chinese society in a methodical way.