The Interaction of Historical Politeness with the Contemporary Politeness: A Case Study of Address Terms in Chinese

               

Zhang Shaojie  Northeast Normal University, Changchun China

 

This study aims to explore how the historical politeness interacts with the contemporary politeness in Chinese based on the data collected from TV dramas. It focuses on three questions: first, what is the historical notion of politeness underlying the ancient Chinese history (prior to the Revolution of 1911) and what is the contemporary politeness derived from the ancient Chinese history and shaped into formation (from the Revolution of 1911 through the founding of New China to present-day times)?, second, how do the historical politeness and contemporary politeness interact with each other in interpersonal communication?, and third, what implications does the interaction bear on the understanding of the conceptualizations of politeness in modern Chinese?

 

The study points out that Chinese culture is a continuum throughout its long history, though there are certain interventions of colonialist invasions and intracultural destructions. It argues that some salient ingredients of the historical politeness project into the contemporary politeness, so that the multi-faceted notion of politeness grounded in the Chinese ideologies in modern Chinese is characteristically distinguishable from the notion of English cultures. Therefore, it would be difficult or even misleading to apply Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness as well as Leech’s Politeness Principle which are specially based on the western philosophical idea of Altruism in explaining the Chinese politeness phenomena. In the light of this argument, this study proposes that Chinese politeness can be redefined as socially acceptable or appropriate behavior supported by the analysis of address terms in interpersonal communication in present-day China.

 

Zhang Shaojie, a professor (Ph.D) of the School of Foreign Languages at Northeast Normal University. His areas of interest include general linguistics, pragmatics, and applied linguistics, especially in Saussurean linguistics, post-Gricean pragmatics and cross-cultural pragmatics. His publications appear in various academic journals such as Language Sciences, Journal of Pragmatics as well as Foreign Language Teaching and Research, Foreign Languages, Modern Foreign Languages, etc. both at home and abroad.