A discursive pragmatic approach to the third person pronoun ta in Chinese computermediated communication
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examines the persuasive discourse of institutional accounts on Sina Weibo which contains the genderless non-standard third person pronoun ta written in the Roman alphabet instead of standard Chinese characters. Mandarin Chinese originally used the single character (ta) to refer to the third person ‘he’, ‘she’, and ‘it’, which later gave way to three separate written ‘standard’ forms: ta ‘he’, ta ‘she’, and ta ‘it’ all with the same pronunciation. From a discourse analysis perspective, the study incorporates the ‘three-move structure’ textual analysis methodology to shed light on both contemporary language use and one of the most under-studied interpersonal dialogic practices in Chinese computer-mediated communication: ta. The research shows that the environments in which ta appears are associated with two main goals: (1) generating monetary profit and (2) generating engagement with services/ideologies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".