Decoding intentions in evaluations: A discursive study of disputants’ discourses in Chinese family mediation

Abstract

Applying discourse analysis, this paper scrutinizes disputants’ discourses in Chinese family mediation, with an aim to reveal how evaluations are employed to manifest their intentions. By adopting a mixed method combining qualitative and quantitative methods, this article analyzes the transcriptions of six authentic recordings of family mediation sessions in Chinese mainland. The results indicate that, first, three categories of evaluations encoding intentions are identified in disputants’ discourses including ethical evaluation, affective evaluation, and informative evaluation; second, disputants’ particular intentions are decoded by their evaluations expressed through specific semantic forms. Additionally, these evaluations conveying varied intentions, are deeply motivated by Chinese socio-cultural values of mianzi (face), renqing (emotion), and guanxi (relationship).