Contextualizing Linguistic Politeness in Chinese

Download or read book Contextualizing Linguistic Politeness in Chinese written by Huey Hannah Lin and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: The current study is concerned with the linguistic realizations of politeness strategies and how they are influenced by contextual factors in persuasive discourse in Chinese. The appropriateness of applying current politeness models to non-Western cultures, such as Chinese, has been questioned for decades with no solutions found. The concept of 'total-context' is proposed to serve as a solution. Total-context refers to an integrated approach to the notion of context that incorporates the socio-cultural and situational factors as frames of reference (at the global level) for interpreting utterances, at the same time acknowledges the dynamic role of context as it is shaped by the on-going interaction (at the local level). An innovative data collection method, Natural Data Elicitation Technique, was introduced. Based on examples from the naturally-occurring speech data collected from salespersons in Taiwan, a qualitative analysis of the data was conducted to examine the linguistic devices that Chinese speakers utilize to accomplish multiple and competing communication tasks in persuasive discourse. The results of the analysis show that the salespersons employed a variety of politeness strategies in which negative politeness was used more frequently than the other two, namely, bald-on-record and positive politeness strategies. Using hedges, including lexical items, syntactic structures and particles, and showing deference are the most common negative politeness strategies. The major bald-on-record strategies include disagreement and giving advice. The acts of showing concern, making promises and guarantees, and in-group language use are the most frequent positive politeness strategies. The collectivist-oriented culture of the Chinese, which values positive face over negative face, was reflected in the salespersons' employment of positive politeness. Social factors such as gender, power, social status and age are found to influence the use of politeness strategies. The situational factor, namely the persuasive discourse and the on-going interactions also affect the employment of politeness strategies. The study concludes that any theory that aims for universal value needs to take into account all the contextual factors by including a 'total-context' component in the model. To this end, a socio-pragmatic approach is not only important, but also essential in analyzing a context-dependent notion such as politeness.