| This study aims to explore experts’ deontic authority-based advice-giving in Chinese Ph.D.dissertation oral defenses from a pragmatic perspective.Deontic authority,which refers to the right to determine future actions,has hardly been examined in pragmatic studies of communicative interaction in academic contexts.This study adopts a discourse-analytical method,combining qualitative and quantitative analyses,to explore how experts implement deontic authority-based advice-giving.Thus,the following three research questions are addressed:(1)What are the types of experts’ advice-giving in Chinese Ph.D.dissertation oral defenses?(2)How is deontic authority manifested through experts’ advice-giving in Chinese Ph.D.dissertation oral defenses?(3)What are the pragmatic functions of experts’ deontic authority-based advice-giving in this setting?The data for this study consists of 20 records of Ph.D.dissertation oral defenses at a key research institute and Faculty of English Language and Culture in a university in South China.A total of 1560 advice-giving sequences are identified from the recorded data.The focal unit of analysis is placed on the experts’ advice-giving through which deontic authority is manifested.The main findings of this study are as follows:Firstly,experts’ advice-giving is implemented through five action types,namely,pronouncement,suggestion,proposal,offer,and assertion.The results of statistics show that suggestion(35%)and proposal(34%)are the most frequently used action types,pronouncement(25%)follows with a higher frequency than the types of offer(3%)and assertion(3%).On the whole,there is significant difference between the first three types and the latter two.Secondly,two kinds of deontic authority are found in experts’ advice-giving,namely strong deontic authority and mitigated deontic authority.Strong deontic authority is reflected in the action type of pronouncement,in which experts not only position themselves as the decision maker of advice-giving,but also emphasize and repeat the advice as it is already determined.Thus,experts present themselves as having a heightened deontic stance to direct Ph.D.students’ future actions.Mitigated deontic authority is reflected in the action types of suggestion,proposal,offer and assertion.In this circumstance,experts give advice while treating Ph.D.students as decision maker of their own future actions,and advice is expressed in a speculative or optional way by empathizing and providing explanations.Thus,experts present a downgraded deontic stance indexing mitigated deontic authority.Finally,based on the findings above and Ph.D.students’ response,it is found that three positive functions are realized in experts’ deontic authority-based advice-giving.Strong deontic authority-based advice-giving functions as strengthening experts’ authoritative identity,while mitigated deontic authority-based advice-giving functions as inspiring Ph.D.students’ deeper thoughts and saving participants’ face.The contributions of this study are as follows: First,it enriches the classification of advice-giving in previous studies by dividing experts’ advice-giving in Ph.D.student dissertation oral defenses into five action types and summarizes linguistic structures of each type.Second,it expands exploration of deontic authority in different communicative interaction contexts by employing deontic authority to examine experts’ advice-giving from a pragmatic perspective.Lastly,it can hopefully deepen the studies of dissertation oral defenses,thus offering an opportunity to better understand this important academic conversation in higher educational institutions. |
