Delving into suggestion speech acts in Chinese authoritative academic discourse: A cognitive pragmatic perspective
KeLi and WenyuLiu
Dalian University of Foreign Languages | Dalian University of Technology
Abstract
This paper aims to examine the realisation of suggestions in authoritative academic discourse through the lens of
cognitive pragmatics. To date, the majority of academic suggestion research has focused on face-to-face interactions in an
institutional context. However, other forms of suggesting, namely the written forms of academic suggestions have not yet been
sufficiently explored. Thus, there is a knowledge gap when it comes to authoritative academic suggestions directed to policy
makers. Such policy maker-directed suggestions are always bound and embedded in particular cultural contexts. As a case study, we
explore the suggestions in authoritative academic discourse with the focus on illocutionary force indicating devices (IFIDs) and
relevant construal strategies. Our data were drawn from the Blue Book of Ecological Governance (China Ecological
Governance development report 2019–2020), an important manifestation of authoritative academic discourse in China.
The findings indicate that three types of IFIDs are deployed to delimit Chinese authoritative academic suggestions, among which
conventionalised and indirect IFIDs are preferred. Notably IFID tools pertain to speakers’ choices of construal strategies for
building up the infrastructure of suggestions. The operation of these strategies reveals how authoritative academic suggestions
are internally coded, as well as how they are built to externally act on. Furthermore, we argue that the speakers’ choices of
construal strategies imply a degree of politeness. The study may shed light upon speech act and politeness research in Chinese
linguaculture.
This paper aims to examine suggestion speech acts in Chinese authoritative academic discourse through a cognitive pragmatic
lens. Note that a speech act is achieved not only by using utterance-level forms, but also via text-level resources that express
intentions (Taguchi, Fernández and Jiang 2021). By exploring the realisation of suggestions
in Chinese authoritative academic discourse, we intend to reveal the reciprocal relationship between cognitive and pragmatic
dimensions in an integrative way.
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