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Article published In:
Pragmatics
Vol. 31:2 (2021) ► pp.173–197

Admonishing

A paradoxical pragmatic behaviour in ancient China

| Dalian University of Foreign Languages | Hungarian Research Institute for Linguistics (NYTI)
| University of Hamburg | Hellenic American University
| Dalian University of Foreign Languages
| Dalian University of Foreign Languages

This paper examines the pragmatic properties of what we define as a ritual act of ‘admonishing’. We argue that admonishing represents a historically embedded realisation type of the speech act Suggest. We explore admonishing in ancient Chinese political and governance texts dated before the 2nd century BC. The results of our analysis show that admonishing often not only affords but even triggers paradoxical pragmatic behaviour. This paradox stems from the fact that, in many historical linguacultures like the ancient Chinese, admonishing was directed at a recipient, most typically a ruler, who was more highly ranked than the admonisher himself. While this context normally precluded threatening the recipient’s face, admonishing was realised in a ritual frame in which such a face threat was deindividuated. In pragmatics, a research gap exists in the study of the historical act of admonishing, and so the current study fills a knowledge gap.

Keywords: admonishing, speech act, Suggest, ancient China, ritual
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Review of literature
  • 3.Data and methodology
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Setting the scene: Admonishing as a paradoxical phenomenon
    • 4.2RFIEs indicating the ritual frame of admonishing and expressions downgrading their force
    • 4.3Discursive practice 1: Referring to historical figures
      • 4.3.1Contrasting the ruler with an ancient sovereign
      • 4.3.2Contrasting the ruler with his father
      • 4.3.3Providing both good and bad examples for the ruler
    • 4.4Discursive practice 2: Quoting ancient sources
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 6 January 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.20022.kad
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