Nominal construction of epistemological positions and power relations in journalistic stance taking: Variation across British and Chinese media discourse in English

Pursuing new ways of understanding the norm of objectivity and journalistic authority in the analysis of contemporary journalistic discourse has been a focal point of interest. Latest developments in the study of journalistic discourse have extended beyond the more traditional critical discourse analysis to methodologies that involve large corpora of texts and in-depth linguistic analysis to capture attitudinal expressions. We aim to study epistemological positions and power relations in journalistic stance taking focused on noun + that -complement clause constructions based on a comparable corpus of British and Chinese media discourse and the application of a functionally based taxonomy of stance nouns. Through the empirical observation about the deployment of different types of stance nouns, our study revealed important similarities between the two discourse types in that they both rely heavily on stance nouns showing beliefs, attitudes and cognitive grounding in addition to those of actions, processes and states of affairs specific to events. More significantly, the study pinpointed important differences by unveiling a preference for verbal propositions and speech acts in British media discourse and a contrasting preference in Chinese media discourse for propositional truth judgements deploying stance nouns designating epistemic status. Most importantly, the current study has suggested a corpus-based approach to stance taking in journalistic discourse by way of functional classification of nouns as a linguistic analytical procedure that has proven to be particularly suited for this purpose.