Acta Linguistica Academica
Volume/Issue:
Volume 66: Issue 2
Political ‘advice’ in Chinese public discourse (s)
Authors:
Fengguang Liu Dalian University of Foreign Languages

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Wenrui Shi Dalian University of Foreign Languages

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Pages:
209–228
Online Publication Date:
Jun 2019
Publication Date:
01 Jun 2019
Article Category:
Research Article
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1556/2062.2019.66.2.4
Keywords:
politeness; alignment; Chinese; political advice; ritual
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Abstract

The practice of ‘political advice’ covers events such as media appearances, in the course of which the representatives of a country deliver symbolic ‘advice’ to another country through a monologous announcement. As such, political ‘advice’ is a ritual practice (Kádár 2017): on the surface level it represents communication with another country and its style is formed according to this symbolic surface function; however, its implicit function is to form alignment between the political authorities who deliver the advice and the citizens of their country. Studying political advice provides a twofold contribution to politeness theory. First, on the empirical level, this discursive ritual practice has not received sufficient academic attention, and so modelling it through the lens of interactional ritual theory fills an empirical knowledge gap in the field of pragmatics and broader sense language and society. Second, by modelling the complex relationship between politeness and political advice, the paper delivers a contribution to the theory of language use, since it demonstrates that in certain ritual practices such as political advice, and arguably a variety of similar ritual practices in the political arena. It is challenging to capture ‘politeness’ in the conventional sense as an other-oriented (and interpersonal) form of pragmatic behaviour, in spite of the fact that on the surface level such forms of communication are veiled as abundantly polite and as other-oriented. We argue that one needs to deploy interactional ritual theory to model the pragmatic operation of this phenomenon. The data studied is drawn from the website of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

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Cover Acta Linguistica Academica
Acta Linguistica Academica An International Journal of Linguistics
Print ISSN:
2559-8201
Online ISSN:
2560-1016

Editors

Editor-in-Chief: András Cser

Editor: György Rákosi

Review Editor: Tamás Halm

Editorial Board

  • Anne Abeillé / Université Paris Diderot
  • Željko Bošković / University of Connecticut
  • Marcel den Dikken / Eötvös Loránd University; Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest
  • Hans-Martin Gärtner / Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest
  • Elly van Gelderen / Arizona State University
  • Anders Holmberg / Newcastle University
  • Katarzyna Jaszczolt / University of Cambridge
  • Dániel Z. Kádár / Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest
  • István Kenesei / University of Szeged; Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest
  • Anikó Lipták / Leiden University
  • Katalin Mády / Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest
  • Gereon Müller / Leipzig University
  • Csaba Pléh / Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Central European University
  • Giampaolo Salvi / Eötvös Loránd University
  • Irina Sekerina / College of Staten Island CUNY
  • Péter Siptár / Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest
  • Gregory Stump / University of Kentucky
  • Peter Svenonius / University of Tromsø
  • Anne Tamm / Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church
  • Akira Watanabe / University of Tokyo
  • Jeroen van de Weijer / Shenzhen University

 

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Acta Linguistica Academica
Language English
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Foundation		 2017 (1951)
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ISSN 2559-8201 (Print)
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