Stancetaking in Hong Kong political discourse

Abstract

This study gives a corpus-assisted discourse study (CADS) of stancetaking in the public speeches of three former Chief Executives. Three large corpora have been built by collecting all the public speeches of the three former Chief Executives. It combines automatic semantic tagging with the tripartite analysis of stancetaking in terms of evaluation, positioning and (dis)alignment. The findings not only reveal their preferential ways of stancetaking but also the changing socio-political contexts behind their particular ways of stancetaking. It is argued that a combination of the methods and theories in critical discourse analysis, stancetaking, and corpus linguistics can generate more illuminating findings concerning stancetaking in political discourse.