Building axiological affiliation in televised Chinese job interviews: Attitudinal evaluations and their communication

Abstract

AbstractResearch on spoken interactions has long shown interest in the communication of evaluations or assessments, but it remains limited in revealing the functions of evaluations charged with attitudinal values. Based on the appraisal framework developed in systemic functional linguistics, this article examines the attitudinal evaluations in eighteen job interviews from a live Chinese television program entitled ‘Only You’, exploring how they are communicated as attitude-ideation couplings to negotiate and construct axiological affiliation between interlocutors. The findings reveal that axiological affiliation in spoken interactions can be built via four strategies, including attitudinal enhancement that involves two layers of attitude-ideation coupling; attitudinal elaboration that may appear as specification of a target of evaluation or elaboration of an attitude; attitudinal extension that works with consistent attitudinal polarity and similar evaluative function; and attitudinal projection that is realized through the expression of attitudinal affinity or attitudinal agreement. This article seeks to extend the existing linguistic account of dialogic affiliation and spoken evaluations and shed light on the systemic functional notion of individuation by construing it as a social process in which social persons’ negotiation of communal identities is coupled with their enactment of different personae.