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Article published In:
Chinese Language and Discourse
Vol. 14:2 (2023) ► pp.301–327

Pronoun TA as a facilitator of empathy in Chinese digital narratives

ORCID logo | University of Alberta

This article presents findings pertaining to digital you-narratives in which ungendered third person Chinese pronoun ta is embedded. The study asks what implications the script choice ta, as opposed to gendered 他 ta ‘he’ and 她 ta ‘she’, has for the facilitation of situational empathy when used in conjunction with specific and generic 你 ni ‘you’. The study draws on 131 digital texts from celebrity verified accounts on social media platform Sina Weibo in October 2015. From a Discourse Analytical perspective, the study utilizes pragmatic and textual approaches under a constructivist narrative analysis framework to examine the facilitative role of ta in relation to empathy invoked in readers. The study proposes that ta is a pragmatic resource used to facilitate the co-construction of emergent narratives based on situational empathy. The implications of said findings are discussed along with future avenues of research.

Keywords: pragmatics, digital narrative, personal pronouns, Internet Linguistics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
  • 3.Data and methodology
    • 3.1Main corpus and Public Figures data set
    • 3.2Coding scheme
    • 3.3Dataset type and dataset motivation
    • 3.4Analytical methods
    • 3.5Textual structure
    • 3.6Illustrative example coding scheme application
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Hypothetical you-narrative
    • 4.2Autotelic you-narrative
    • 4.3Quantitative discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 14 July 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cld.21008.slu
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