Prof. LIU Ming, Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies

Doing facework in Public Mourning Discourse on China’s Social Media: A Corpus-assisted Discourse Study. The 2nd East Asian Pragmatics Symposium. School of Foreign Languages, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, 6-8 December 2024.

Abstract
This study presents a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of public mourning following the passing of the business leader Zong Qinghou, the founder and CEO of the Wahaha Group. The research interrogates the manifestation of facework mechanisms in collective expressions of bereavement, predicated on the theoretical assumption that Chinese cultural paradigms fundamentally shape these mourning practices. The methodology encompasses the construction and analysis of a specialized corpus comprising mourning-related discourse collected over a three-week period following Zong’s passing. Through the application of KH Coder, a computational text mining tool, this study systematically examines the multilayered manifestations of facework across various discourse strata. The findings are anticipated to contribute to the theoretical understanding of the intricate interrelationships between mourning discourse, facework strategies, and culture.