Acta Linguistica Academica
Volume/Issue:
Volume 66: Issue 2
Classical Chinese pronouns: Pragmatic implications and politeness
Author:
Cher Leng Lee National University of Singapore

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Pages:
271–288
Online Publication Date:
Jun 2019
Publication Date:
01 Jun 2019
Article Category:
Research Article
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1556/2062.2019.66.2.7
Keywords:
politeness; first-person pronouns; Classical Chinese; pragmatic implications; indexicality
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Abstract

Contemporary Chinese has only one form of first-person pronoun; by contrast, there are at least four different first-person pronominal forms used in Classical Chinese. This makes Classical Chinese first-person pronouns noteworthy to investigate. This co-existence of forms with similar meaning of self-referencing raises two issues, namely the reason behind this co-existence and the relationships among these pronominal forms in terms of sociopragmatic use. Unlike what has been previously argued in the field that address forms rather than pronouns are politeness-related (e.g., Kádár 2007; Pan & Kádár 2011), first-person pronominal forms in Classical Chinese express a diverse set of contextually-situated politeness-related meanings. Furthermore, these pronominal forms are socially indexical, in the sense that they are allocated to speakers depending on their social status. Thus, a central argument of this paper is that the pronominal forms studied reveal information about both the person who uses them and the context in which they are used. The paper compares pronominal forms used in the Lunyu 論語 or The analects of Confucius (475 BC–221 BC) and Shishuo Xinyu 世說新語 (A new account of the tales of the world) (200 AD–400 AD), to understand the pragmatic implications and politeness values of these different first-person pronominal forms over a time-span of 400–600 years and also to provide a glimpse of how eventually only one form came to exist in contemporary Chinese.

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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
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