Language and Identity: Analysing the Discourse of the Sunflower Movement in Taiwan

This thesis examines the linguistic features of democratic protest discourse in Taiwanese Mandarin, with a focus on Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement in March 2014. The study approaches it as a discursive phenomenon shaped through interaction across genres, platforms and social actors, rather than treating the movement as a unified political event. By analysing protest-related discourse, the thesis explores how language functions as a form of social practice through which democratic meanings, civic identities and power relations are articulated and negotiated in Taiwan’s contemporary political context. In terms of methodology, the study adopts a corpus-assisted discourse analytical approach, combining quantitative corpus techniques with qualitative discourse interpretation. Corpus analysis is used to identify salient linguistic patterns, including frequency, co-occurrence and lexical salience, which then inform more detailed qualitative analysis. The analysis is organised across three analytical levels - text anlaysis, discourse practice and social practice - providing a structured framework for examining how linguistic patterns relate to broader communicative and social processes. The findings indicate that Sunflower Movement discourse is characterised by extensive intertextuality and interdiscursivity across genres, through which competing interpretations of democratic participation and claims to civic legitimacy were articulated and contested within Taiwanese society. Within this multi-genre discursive environment, the analysis of the 被 (bei) construction demonstrates how agency, responsibility and victimhood were differentially distributed, revealing ongoing tensions between institutional authority and civic actors. Social media discourse further intensified these dynamics by enabling bottom-up participation and facilitating the circulation and reconfiguration of alternative interpretations beyond the constraints of traditional media. Overall, these findings show that, although public discussion of the movement has diminished over the past decade, the discursive patterns established during the Sunflower Movement continue to shape debates on democracy, identity and political participation in Taiwan. This thesis thus contributes to a linguistically grounded understanding of democratic discourse in Taiwan and demonstrates the value of corpus-assisted approaches for analysing political and social movements in Chinese-language contexts.