This study, by means of conversation analysis, comprehensively illuminates the advisee’s acceptance of advice in Chinese phone-in counseling for family problems from the perspective of Epistemics, and reveals advisee’s type of management of the epistemic status relationship as well as the epistemic stances during executing the management. The study finds that the advisee tacitly approved of the asymmetric relationship of epistemic status between an adviser and himself/herself when accepting advice; that this type of relationship management can be executed through four kinds of epistemic stances; that these stances actually reflect the advisee’s positioning of asymmetric relationship of knowledge distribution of both parties. This study investigates the acceptance of advice from the perspective of Epistemics, which can extend the theoretical perspective of the researches on responses to advice and give new illumination of the advisory interaction.

At present, there is an emotional turn in news researches, however, there are not many theories dedicated to the studies of emotions in news discourse. Therefore, by employing corpus analysis, this paper proposes Socio-emotional Theory, and contrasts the emotions in the news discourse on Hong Kong National Security Law between China’s and American newspapers. The results show that as for the themes of emotional discourse, China’s newspapers emphasize national security, social stability, anti-interference in China’s internal affairs, the positive roles of the law, the destructive nature of Hong Kong separatists, and their unreasonable resistance to the law; while American newspapers highlight their worry and fear about the law. Secondly, in terms of the distribution of emotional semantic categories, China’s newspapers talk more about confidence and happiness; however, American newspapers display more fear, sadness, worry, anger, and disappointment. As for ideologies, China’s newspapers show support for the law with less worry, while American newspapers display their opposition to the law with worry and anger, and these differences in ideologies actually reflect the conflict between China’s Democratic Centralism and western Populism. This study can provide enlightenment for the construction of a harmonious international discourse system, expand the ontological components and interpretation boundaries of discourse analysis theories, and promote the researches on emotions of news discourse.

At present, Epistemics is a popular theory in Western conversation analysis, but few scholars investigate the responses to the advice resistance on phone-ins from the perspective of Epistemics. This paper explores the responses to the advice resistance on Chinese phone-ins of family problem counseling from the perspective of Epistemics. It is found that when responding to the caller’s advice resistance, the host often implements two conversation practices, such as maintaining his/her original higher epistemic status or constructing higher epistemic status in another epistemic domain. These practices are consistent with the possibility of the host’s knowledge orientation to strong self-confidence in his/her own professional knowledge but the lack of confidence in the caller’s relevant knowledge. This study can provide enlightenment for the smooth development of advice interaction on phone-ins of family problem counseling and expand the application scope of Epistemics.