A Pragmatic Approach To Cultural Stances In Utterance Understanding

The term stance comes from the philosophical concept subjectivity,referring to the beliefs,opinions,and attitudes that are expressed through linguistic or non-linguistic means by the speaker/writer in language use.Subjectivity is the natural property of language,i.e.when the speaker/writer produces utterances,they are at the same time expressing their attitudes toward a person,an object or a state.Scholars have approached subjectivity from different perspectives and provided different terms and definitions,among which the term stance has received much more attention for the reason that it brings in the conception of speech community and takes the cultural and ideological factors of the speaker/writer into consideration,which helps the research of stance break through the internal linguistic forms and transform to a much broader perspective.From different perspectives,scholars have put forward authorial stance,interpersonal stance,intentional stance,and social stance,etc.and have made explorations of them.However,the previous studies on stance focused on lexical and grammatical forms.Although many scholars have mentioned the social and cultural factors that influence the expressions of stance,most of them focus on the different uses of some vocabulary especially adjectives.In addition,there has not been a clear definition of cultural stance,not to mention the pragmatic analysis of its deep reasons and the categories,functions,triggers,principles,and strategies in a systematic way.Therefore,the present study defines cultural stance as a manifestation of a speaker positioning that is culturally defined or culturally activated for either realistic(situated)or cultural goals of interaction.Behind every cultural stance,a definite(set of)cultural assumption(s)must be accessible.Stance will not have concrete contextual meaning unless it is connected with the indexicality of language.Traditional deixis can indicate contextual information in a much explicit way,however,when it comes to complex contexts such as social context or cultural context,the direct deictic forms seem to fail since much contextual information does not exist in a unilateral and simple way,but in a systematic and relevant pattern.Much of the cultural information cannot be perceived at the surface reading.Based on this consideration,professor He Gang put forward another kind of deixis,i.e.cultural deixis,or culture-deictic expressions(the two terms are interchangeably used in this study)to make it up.What cultural deixis is intended to explore includes various categories in traditional pragmatics and the contexts in which these categories are situated as well,especially the expansion in cultural context.It seeks the interpretation of classical deixis from a much deeper and broader perspective.The present study is a pragmatic analysis of the expression of cultural stances in utterances on the basis of mainstream cultural assumptions and by referring to certain cultural contexts.The research of cultural stances has its own objective foundations,i.e.cultural assumptions that are shared by the members in the common cultural pragmatic community,including beliefs,attitudes,values and customs,etc.,which will promote speakers to naturally express their cultural stances in communication.According to the nature of the expression of cultural stance,we classify cultural stances into three major categories,i.e.positive stance,neutral stance and negative stance.The functions of cultural stance expression include identity construction and culture maintenance.Through the analysis of natural utterances in American cultural context and Chinese cultural context,the study finds that the expression of cultural stances has its triggers,including physical characteristics,events,statements,performance and behaviors,etc.The present study identifies two principles,i.e.being well-grounded and being resonating.Cultural stances can be realized by various strategies,including lexical strategies,syntactic strategies,conversational strategies and rhetorical devices.Lexical strategies include adjectives,nouns,and noun phrases;syntactic strategies include repetition,imperative sentences and negative sentences staring with I;conversational strategies include conversational structure and turn-taking and rhetorical devices include metaphor,parallelism,analogy and comparison,etc.This study is a preliminary research on the expression of cultural stances with the aim of providing a reasonable interpretation framework for the pragmatic study on cultural stances in utterance understanding.It is also expected to make up the inadequacy in stance study and provide theoretical and practical implications for foreign language learning and teaching.Since it is a preliminary study on cultural stance,it leaves much research space.On the one hand,the categorizations of cultural stance should take other factors into consideration so as to make it more complete.On the other hand,with the more detailed analysis of data,it is possible to find more strategies to realized cultural stances,enriching the research on cultural stances.