When TCM debate meets Covid-19 discourse: Identifying evidentiality in Chinese social-mediated communication.

  • Published In: Pragmatics & Society, 2025, v. 16, n. 5. P. 623 1 of 3

  • Database: Sociology Source Ultimate 2 of 3

  • Authored By: Pan, Yun; Peng, Altman Yuzhu 3 of 3

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has pushed medical discourse to the forefront of everyday communication, but limited scholarly attention has been given to its intersection with social-mediated language use in the Chinese context. From a corpus-pragmatic view, we examined textual data collected from Zhihu, the most popular Chinese community question-answering site. Our analysis focused on the linguistic mechanism of evidential expression in social-mediated debates on Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Within the realm of medical scientific discussion, we identified a prevailing epistemic stance of doubt and uncertainty towards the efficacy of TCM, emphasising its socio-political significance. We also demonstrated how the 'source of knowledge' value and the 'speaker commitment' value of evidentiality interact at the semantic-pragmatic interface. Our findings shed light on a promising research trajectory for sociolinguistic intervention in the formal, descriptive line of evidentiality research, thus, advancing existing corpus pragmatics literature on evidentiality and epistemics in social-mediated communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Additional Information

  • Source:Pragmatics & Society. 2025/09, Vol. 16, Issue 5, p623
  • Document Type:Article
  • Subject Area:Communication and Mass Media
  • Publication Date:2025
  • ISSN:1878-9714
  • DOI:10.1075/ps.23019.pan
  • Accession Number:187643287
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