Approaching EFL Learners’ Stancetaking Tendencies from the Phonetic and Cognitive Semantic Perspective: A Preliminary Study

Abstract

The study proposes an interdisciplinary approach to EFL stancetaking by joining the fields of phonetics and cognitive semantics. The analysis is conducted on speech data realized by ten third-year English-major students, who were asked to offer their views on censorship. The first goal was to ascertain how the attitudinal assessments are expressed through certain linguistic expressions. In order to do so, the speech data were transcribed and annotated for stance polarity according to the principles underlying both Appraisal Theory (Martin,White 2005) and Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff, Johnson 2003 [1980]). This resulted in a list of metaphorical linguistic expressions with positive or negative evaluation which provided a basis for the subsequent phonetic analysis. Namely, tests were carried out to determine whether or not there were notable differences in the way stance polarity (positive/negative) is signaled acoustically (on the basis of the extracted measures of fundamental frequency and intensity). It was observed that our subjects’ speech exhibited a low degree of metaphoricity, since they predominantly opted for literal or non-metaphorical language when discussing the topic. Linguistic expressions with positive evaluation were generally less frequent, while negative assessment predominated in the transcripts. The comparison of the prosodic properties of these two stance categories revealed that, in our subjects’ speech, negative stance tends to be signaled by an increase in both pitch and loudness, yet the differences between the two groups did not prove to be statistically significant. We hope that the interdisciplinary discussion presented here can facilitate further investigation of the topic on a larger scale.