Kěài ‘cute’ in Mandarin
Its meanings, uses, and changes in Internet communication
The word kěài in Mandarin is semantically rich. However, little research has been devoted to examining
its meanings and uses, let alone possible innovative usage following the popularity of social media platforms. Hence, this study aims to
examine in detail (a) the descriptive range, meanings and functions of kěài, and (b) possible changes of its usage in
Internet communication. To achieve these goals, a total of 800 tokens of kěài were collected and analyzed–400 from the
Sinica Corpus and 400 from two widely used social media platforms, representing the data before and after social media platforms became
popular. Our major findings are: First, although human beings and non-human objects are what kěài mostly
describes, its descriptive range is shifting to more abstract entities for much higher percentages of Abstract Entity and Event are found on
the social media platforms. Second, the influence of age and gender factors has weakened. Third, although most of the non-human cases are
described as kěài due to their external features, most of the human cases in the Sinica Corpus are called
kěài for their external features while on the social media platforms, for their non-external features. Fourth,
kěài conveys positive meanings most of the time, and the three most frequently found meanings of kěài in
the Sinica Corpus are different from those on the social media platforms. Fifth, kěài is found to serve as hedges in both
sets of data, but it is also used to show surprise on the social media platforms.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Literature review
- 2.1Studies of kawaii in Japanese
- 2.2Studies of kěài in Mandarin
- 3.Data collection
- 4.Descriptive range of kěài
- 4.1The classification criteria of kěài-objects and kěài-properties
- 4.2Results and discussion
- 4.2.1
Kěài-objects
- 4.2.2
Kěài-properties
- 5.Meanings and pragmatic functions of kěài
- 5.1Meanings and pragmatic functions of kěài found in the data
- 5.2Comparison of meanings and functions of kěài in the two sets of data
- 5.3Meaning extension of kěài based on the framework of emergent lexical semantics
- 5.3.1An emergent view of lexical semantics
- 5.3.2Meaning extension of kěài and emergent lexical semantics
- 6.Concluding remarks
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
- List of abbreviations
-
References