Chinese Discourse and Interaction - Theory and Practice - Yuling Pan
14. ‘Polysemous’ politeness: Speaker self-referring forms in Honglou Meng
Chinese Discourse and Interaction - Theory and Practice - Yuling Pan
Xinren Chen [+]
Nanjing University
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Xinren Chen is Professor of English and Linguistics in the School of Foreign Studies at Nanjing University, China and is co-founder and editor of East Asian Pragmatics. He has published papers in pragmatics and foreign language teaching in journals such as Journal of Pragmatics, Pragmatics and Society, Journal of Historical Pragmatics, English for Academic Purposes, Acta Linguistica, Foreign Language Teaching and Research, Modern Foreign Languages, and Contemporary Linguistics. The major monographs he authors or co-authors include Contemporary Pragmatics, English Grammar in Use, The Pragmatics of Overinformativeness in Conversation, Critical Pragmatic Studies on Chinese Public Discourse, Politeness across Chinese Genres, Pragmatic Identity: How to Do Things with Words of Identity, and Pragmatics and Foreign Language Teaching.
Description
Drawing on data from the vernacular novel Honglou Meng 红楼楼 (A Dream of Red Mansions), also referred to as Shitou Ji 石头记 (The Story of the Stone), a vernacular Chinese novel written in the Qing dynasty, this study examines the ways in which speakers referred to/ addressed themselves in pre-modern Chinese society. Its goal is to contextually analyse the circumstances under which characters in the novel employ the expressions for self-reference and reveal the possible motivations behind their choice, so as to more fully exhibit the complexities of politeness behind the use of Chinese address forms.