Keynote Speakers

Assoc. Prof. Fei Yuan, Associate Professor

School of Foreign Studies, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin, China

Biography: Assoc. Prof. Fei Yuan, associate professor at Harbin Engineering University, is a member of China Pragmatics Association. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently engaged in pragmatics and philosophy of language research. She has presided over more than 10 projects at the provincial level and above, and published 20 papers.

Topic: Chinese Women’s Fear of Marriage: A Cultural Pragmatic Perspective

Abstract: The practice of fear of marriage discourse is a very representative social language phenomenon, which profoundly reveals the subject’s logical orientation towards of fear. In view of this, based on the authentic microblog data, this paper discusses the targets, construction strategies and control procedures of Chinese women’s fear of marriage discourse from the perspective of cultural pragmatics. As far as the referent is concerned, it can be divided into self-orientation and other orientation; As far as the construction strategy is concerned, it is manifested in the stigma and derogation of self-identity in the dimension of self-orientation, and in the dimension of other orientation, it is manifested in the absence of self-power and the counterattack of other power; As far as the control procedure is concerned, women’s fear of marriage discourse is essentially a fear demand for “identity loss”, and the internal driving core belongs to the psychological defense mechanism of self-esteem, power and sense of belonging. Therefore, it is necessary to construct the psychological reality of Chinese women’s fear of marriage based on the macro “family” cultural field, which is an important research perspective in interpersonal discourse in the future.