The expression of stance in Mandarin Chinese: A corpus-based study of stance adverbs

Stance-taking is considered as one of the fundamental properties of human communication (Jaffe, 2009). It is pervasive, intersubjective, and collaborative. While a good deal of research has investigated the expression of stance in English, much less has been done in Chinese. In this study, we draw upon the five-million-word Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese to investigate a comprehensive set of 34 stance adverbs expressing certainty, likelihood, attitude, and style (Biber, 2006b) across various modes of communication, diverse genres, and media channels. In addition, we also zero in on a pair of synonymous stance adverbs i.e. dique vs. queshi, to illustrate the subtle and nuanced functional and distributional differences across different genres and registers. Implications for Chinese dictionary compiling, pedagogy and sentiment analysis are discussed.