Tao, Yingnian (2020) Expressing criticism of public figures on Chinese social media : A case study of Wuhan Diary. In: Corpora and Discourse International Conference 2020, 2020-06-17 - 2020-06-19, online.
Full text not available from this repository.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.