Politeness Phenomena Across Chinese Genres

This volume looks at politeness phenomena in a culture and country that is becoming the most influential in the world. It is the first book to survey politeness variations across different genres in Chinese and fills a gap in both politeness research in general and in Chinese politeness research in particular.Unlike existing studies which treat Chinese politeness phenomena as non-varying this study provides systemic evidence for how linguistic polite behaviour varies across genres in China. These intracultural variations which are investigated in the volume include addressing, backchanneling, identity construction and rapport management which are subject to the influence of genre differences such as formality of occasion, media and channel of communication, presence or absence of interlocutor or third party and role-configurations. The volume offers those who read or write Chinese texts or engage in Chinese conversation an enriched knowledge of how politeness as the most important type of interpersonal meaning is communicated in different genres in that language.

This volume presents how Chinese people communicate with various meta-level expressions for different purposes across contexts. It demonstrates empirically how the use of these expressions contributes to the management of meaning generation, interpersonal relating and discourse organization. It will serve to shed light on the understanding of how Chinese people monitor their speech in the course of communication, and will function as an important reference for researchers and students who conduct cross-linguistic comparative or contrastive metapragmatic research concerning Chinese and other languages.

Through a thorough treatment of Chinese politeness, this book argues that universalism is of paramount importance in politeness theorizing.

Pan and Kadar's exciting research compares historical and contemporary Chinese (im)polite communication norms and maps the similarities and differences between them. Considering the importance of China on the world stage, understanding Chinese politeness norms is pivotal, to both experts of communication studies and those who have interactions with the Chinese community.

Weibo, a hybrid of Twitter and Facebook, a popular microblogging service platform originated from China, has become one of the leading SNSs in Greater China Region. It features huge numbers of active users as well as verified high-profiled celebrity users and corporate users. Incorporating the insights from socio-psychology field to build an integrated framework of analysis for describing and explaining the processes and products of online identity construction by Chinese celebrities, the book represents an attempt to investigates how Chinese celebrities discursively construct their personal and social identities on Sina Weibo. The book can serve as a reference to the research on identity construction with its significant insights regarding the multi-faceted nature and relational dynamics of identity construction on social media and the uncovering of linguistic acts and features constituting relational identity. In addition, the insights from the study could be a reference to provide practical implications for personal branding and personal rapport management in the new Web 2.0 era.

This book attempts to bring in the perspective of situational variation in analyzing linguistic politeness, and looks at politeness in the larger framework of social context. It outlines the way into the problem of politeness in Chinese culture and the steps taken in the application of politeness strategies in verbal interaction.

With the “discursive turn” has come a distrust – a complete rejection by some – of theories that seek deeper reasons for surface phenomena. Rong Chen argues that this distrust, with its accompanying overemphasis on specificity and fluidity of linguistic meaning and social values, is unwarranted and unhelpful. Drawing on insights from social theories and various strands of pragmatics, he proposes a motivation model of pragmatics (MMP), contending that language use can be adequately, coherently, and elegantly studied via the motivation behind it in its varied and dynamic contexts. The model, with its well-laid out components, is then applied to (im)politeness research, cross-cultural pragmatics, diachronic pragmatics, discourse and genre analysis, conversation analysis, identity construction, and the study of metaphor, sarcasm, parody, and lying. MMP is thus a framework aimed at accounting for fluidity with stable notions, specificity with general principles, and differences with similar underlying factors. As such, the book should appeal to students of pragmatics, (im)politeness, conversation analysis, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, communication, sociology, and psychology.

There is growing acceptance among pragmaticians that identity is often (de)constructed and negotiated in communication in order to impact the outcome of the interaction. Filling an important gap in current research, this book offers the first systematic, pragmatic theory to account for the generative mechanisms of identity in communication. Using data drawn from real-life communicative contexts in China, Xinren Chen examines why identity strategies are adopted, how and why identities are constructed and what factors determine their appropriateness and effectiveness. In answering these questions, this book argues that identity is an essential communicative resource, present across various domains and able to be exploited to facilitate the realization of communicative needs. Demonstrating that communication in Chinese involves the dynamic choice and shift of identity by discursive means, Exploring Identity Work in Chinese Communication suggests that identity is intersubjective in communication in all languages and that it can be accepted, challenged, or even deconstructed.