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Expressing criticism of public figures on Chinese social media: A case study of Wuhan Diary

Research output: Contribution to conference - Without ISBN/ISSN Abstractpeer-review

Published
Publication date17/06/2020
Number of pages1
Pages116-116
<mark>Original language</mark>English
EventCorpora and Discourse International Conference 2020 - online, United Kingdom
Duration: 17/06/202019/06/2020
Conference number: 5th
http://corporadiscourse.com

Conference

ConferenceCorpora and Discourse International Conference 2020
Abbreviated titleCADS 2020
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
Period17/06/2019/06/20
Internet address

Abstract

On 13 May, a Chinese writer Fang Fang asked Zhang Boli, the academician of the Academy of Engineering, to apologise to her for he reprimands Fang’s motive in disseminating false information in her Wuhan Diary about the national campaign against the Covid-19 pandemic during the Wuhan lockdown. The hashtag #Fangfang asked Zhang Boli to apologise went viral on Weibo (Chinese twitter) with netizens taking sides distinctively. The current project takes interest in how netizens address the two characters whilst expressing their stance (i.e. anti- Fang, pro-Fang, neutral). It explores three aspects of address terms: 1) types address terms e.g., honorifics, derogatives, parody; 2) position of address terms, viz., sentence-initial, sentence- middle and sentence-final; 3) collocations of address terms, e.g., address terms in a noun phrase. It also explores the statistical relationship between three aspects of address terms/independent variables and the netizens’ stance/dependent variable by using R functions such as decision tree and multinomial logistic regression. This study aims to enrich the research of stance-taking in online forums by introducing address terms as well as statistical analysis.