Making claims and counterclaims through factuality: The uses of Mandarin Chinese qishi (‘actually’) and shishishang (‘in fact’) in institutional settings

Abstract

The study reported here, building on the research methods of Conversation Analysis (Sacks et al., 1974), Politeness Theory (Brown and Levinson, 1987), and Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986/1995), attempts to examine the distribution of Mandarin qishi ('actually') and shishishang ('in fact') across two different discourse modes in formal speech settings: formal lectures and TV panel news discussions. The results indicate that qishi is prevalent in TV panel news discussion data, which fall into the interactional mode, whereas shishishang is more prevalent in formal speech at UNIV OF CONNECTICUT on May 30, 2015 dis.sagepub.com Downloaded from 236 Discourse Studies 13 (2) data, which fall into the transactional mode. The study shows that in interaction, qishi is addresseeoriented and signals alignment (agreement) or divergence (disagreement), whereas shishishang is message-oriented and asserts a proposition with a tone of certainty. In addition, the study suggests that although the literal meanings of qishi ('it's fact') and shishishang ('in the aspect of fact'), which are concerned with factuality, are seemingly unrelated to emotive expressivity, they offer a rhetorical strategy for expressing the speaker's attitudinal position, and can both serve to indicate the speaker's epistemic inference.

Resonance as an Applied Predictor of Cross-Cultural Interaction: Constructional Priming in Mandarin and American English Interaction

“…A similar study on Mandarin mundane conversations carried out byZhu (2014a) reveals that non-familial, equal-status native speakers often rely on strong disagreement as a strategy of facework and rapport mantainment.Sentence peripheral pragmatic marking and intersubjectivity have also been shown to intersect with speech acts of disagreement in the Chinese context. Cases in points are the adverbials 其实 qíshí 'actually' and 事实上 shìshí shàng 'in fact', with the function of mitigating the threatening of recipients' face(Hsieh & Huang 2005, Wang et al 2010, Wang et al 2011.Zhu (2014b) investigated naturally occurring conversations produced by Chinese speakers of English with strong disagreement in spontaneous English conversations among non-familial, equal-status Chinese native speakers was similarly characterised by predominantly face-enhancing and face-maintaining acts (see alsoZhu & Boxer 2013 on strong disagreement in Mandarin and English as a Lingua Franca).…”