Cover not available
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
References (54)
References
Primary sources
Cobbett’s Parliamentary History of England, Volume 1: From the Norman Conquest, in 1066, to the Year, 1809. London: Curson Hansard.Google Scholar
Guanzi (Master Guan). 2016 Edition. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju.Google Scholar
Guoyu (Discourses of the States). 2016 Edition. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju.Google Scholar
Lüshi Chunqiu (Master Lü’s Spring and Autumn Annals). 2011 Edition. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju.Google Scholar
Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian). 2011 Edition. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju.Google Scholar
Yanzi Chunqiu (Annals of Master Yan). 2015 Edition. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju.Google Scholar
Zhan Guo Ce (Annals of the Warring States). 2012 Edition. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju.Google Scholar
Zuozhuan (The Commentary of Zuo). 2016 Edition. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju.Google Scholar
Secondary sources
Agha, Asif. 1998. “Stereotypes and Registers of Honorific Language.” Language in Society 27 (2): 151–193. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bax, Marcel. 1981. “Rules for Ritual Challenges: A Speech Convention among Medieval Knights.” Journal of Pragmatics 5 (5): 423–444. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brinton, Laurel J. 2001. “Historical Discourse Analysis.” In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, ed. by Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen, and Heidi E. Hamilton, 138–160. Oxford, England: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals of Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bull, Peter, Anita Fetzer, and Dániel Z. Kádár. 2020. “Calling Mr Speaker ‘Mr Speaker’: The Strategic Use of Ritual References to The Speaker of The UK House of Commons.” Pragmatics 30 (1): 64–87. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cai, Minglun 蔡明倫. 2009. “Mingdai guanyuan jinjian moshi ji qi tedian 明代官員進諫模式及其特點 [The key features of admonishments in the Ming Dynasty].” Beijing Lianhe Daxue Xuebao 北京聯合大學學報 [Journal of Beijing United University] 7 (4): 62–68.Google Scholar
Chen, Kuang-Yu. 2017. “ The Book of Odes: A Case Study of the Chinese Hermeneutic Tradition. In Interpretation and Intellectual Change: Chinese Hermeneutics in Historical Perspective, ed. by Ching-I Tu, 47–62. New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chen, Xinren. 2019. “‘Family-culture’ and Chinese Politeness An Emancipatory Pragmatic Account.” Acta Linguistica Academica 66 (2): 251–270. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chen, Wei 陳瑋. 2011. “Richang hanyu guiquan yanyu xingwei ji celüeyanjiu 日常漢語規勸言語行為及策略研究 [On admonishing speech acts and strategies adopted in daily Chinese communication].” Jixi daxue xuebao 雞西大學學報 [Journal of Jixi University] 11 (2): 130–133.Google Scholar
Dauphinais, Michael, and Matthew Levering. 2005. Holy People, Holy Land: A Theological Introduction to the Bible. New York: Baker Books.Google Scholar
DuBois, James M. 2002. “Adolf Reinach: Metaethics and The Philosophy of Law.” Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy 471: 327–346. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Edmondson, Willis. 1981. Spoken Discourse: A Model for Analysis. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Edmondson, Willis, and Juliane House. 1981. Let’s Talk and Talk About It: An Interactional Grammar of English. München: Urban & Schwarzenberg.Google Scholar
Galvany, Albert. 2012. “Sly Mouths and Silver Tongues: The Dynamics of Psychological Persuasion in Ancient China.” Extreme-Orient 341: 15–40. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Pilar. 2015. “Setting the Linguistics Research Agenda for the E-service Encounters Genre: Natively Digital versus Digitized Perspectives.” In A Multidisciplinary Approach to Service Encounters, ed. by Maria de la O Hernández-López, and Lucía Fernández Amaya, 13–36. Leiden: Brill. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Green, Eugene. 1995. “On Syntactic and Pragmatic Features of Speech Acts in Wulfstan’s Homilies.” In Insights in Germanic Linguistics I: Methodology in Transition, ed. by Irmengard Rauch, and Gerald F. Carr, 109–126. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Han, Gaonian 韓高年. 2018. “Chunqiu ‘Lizhi’ yu ‘Jingguo-zhi-wen’ de shengcheng – Yi zhenglun, jianci, wendui santi wei hexin 春秋“禮治”與“經國之文”的生成 – 以政論、諫辭、問對三體為核心 [‘Lizhi’ in the Spring and Autumn Period and the creation of ‘Jingguo Zhiwen’: Examining political commentary, admonishment rhetoric and question-answers].” Wen-Shi-Zhe 文史哲 [Literature, History and Philosophy] 364 (1): 70–88.Google Scholar
He, Taole 賀陶樂. 2003. “‘Zuozhuan’ jianshuo yingdui-de celüe yishu 《左傳》諫說應對的策略藝術 [The art of persuasion tactics Zuozhuan].” Xibei nonglin-keji-daxue xuebao 西北農林科技大學學報 [Journal of Northeast A&F University] 3 (5): 134–137.Google Scholar
He, Ziran, and Wei Ren. 2016. “Current Address Behaviour in China.” East Asian Pragmatics 1 (2): 163–180. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hostetler, Margaret. 2012. “The Politeness of a Disciplining Text: Ideal Readers in Ancrene Wisse.” Journal of Historical Pragmatics 13 (1): 29–49. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
House, Juliane. 1986. “Acquiring Translational Competence in Interaction.” In Interlingual and Intercultural Communication: Discourse and Cognition in Translation and Second Language Acquisition Studies, ed. by Juliane House, and Shoshana Blum-Kulka, 179–192. Tubingen: Narr.Google Scholar
. 1989. “Politeness in English and German: The Functions of Please and Bitte .” In Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies, ed. by Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Juliane House, and Gabriele Kasper, 96–119. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
House, Juliane, and Dániel Z. Kádár. 2021. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Houston, Walter. 1993. “What Did the Prophets Think They Were Doing? Speech Acts and Prophetic Discourse in the Old Testament.” Biblical Interpretation 1 (2): 167–188. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ide, Sachiko. 1989. “Formal Forms and Discernment: Two Neglected Aspects of Universals of Linguistic Politeness.” Multilingua 8 (2/3): 223–248. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jacobs, Andreas, and Andreas H. Jucker. 1995. “The Historical Perspective in Pragmatics.” In Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic Developments in The History of English, ed. by Andreas H. Jucker, 3–33. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kádár, Dániel Z. 2007. Terms of (Im)Politeness: On the Communicational Properties of Traditional Chinese Terms of Address. Budapest: Eötvös Loránd University Press.Google Scholar
2017. Politeness, Impoliteness and Ritual: Maintaining the Moral Order in Interpersonal Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kádár, Dániel Z., and Juliane House. 2020. “Ritual Frames: A Contrastive Pragmatic Approach.” Pragmatics 30 (1): 142–168. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kádár, Dániel Z., Juliane House, Fengguang Liu, and Wenrui Shi. 2020. “Reporting Ritual Political Advice in the Chinese State Media: A study of the National People’s Congress.” Discourse, Context & Media 351. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kallia, Alexandra. 2005. “Directness as a Source of Misunderstanding: The Case of Requests and Suggestions.” In Broadening the Horizon of Linguistic Politeness, ed. by Robin Lakoff and Sachiko Ide, 217–234. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ke, Zhenchang 柯鎮昌. 2012. “Xian-Qin jian-tiwen ji qi wenhua yiyun 先秦諫體文及其文化意蘊 [Admonishing literary pieces and their cultural impact in Pre-Qin China].” Wenyi pinglun 文藝評論 [Literature and Art Criticism] 101: 4–7.Google Scholar
Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine. 2011. “From Good Manners to Facework: Politeness Variations and Constants in France, From the Classic Age to Today.” Journal of Historical Pragmatics 12 (1/2): 133–155. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kohnen, Thomas. 1999. “Corpora and Speech Acts: The Study of Performatives.” In Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, ed. by Christian Mair, and Marianne Hundt, 177–186. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
Lichtheim, Miriam. 1976. Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Book of Readings. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Mao, Zhixiang 冒誌祥, and Jiyong Hou 侯吉永. 2007. “Gudai jinjian gongwen de shuofu xiuci 古代進諫公文的說服修辭 [On persuasive rhetoric in ancient admonishment sources]”. Xiuci xuexi 修辭學習 [Rhetoric Study] 144 (6): 76–78.Google Scholar
McCabe, David R. 2008. How to Kill Things with Words: Ananias and Sapphira Under the Apostolic-Prophetic Speech-Act of Divine Judgment (Acts 4:32–5:11). PhD Thesis, Edinburgh, The University of Edinburgh.Google Scholar
Ning, Dengguo 寧登國. 2012. “Xian-Qin tingzheng zhidu yu jianti wenxue de xingsheng 先秦聽證制度與諫體文學的興盛 [The hearing system of the Pre-Qin period and the development of the admonishment literature].” Xueshu luntan 學術論壇 [Academic Forum] 6 (1): 158–162.Google Scholar
Pan, Yuling, and Kádár, Dániel Z. Kádár. 2011a. Politeness in Historical and Contemporary Chinese. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
. 2011b. “Historical vs. Contemporary Chinese Linguistic Politeness.” Journal of Pragmatics 43 (6): 1525–1539. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Petersen, David L. 2002. The Prophetic Literature: An Introduction. Westminster: John Know Press.Google Scholar
Shen, Xingchen, and Xinren Chen. 2019. “Doing Power Threatening Acts (PTAs) in Ancient China: An Empirical Study of Chinese Jian Discourse.” Journal of Historical Pragmatics 20 (1): 132–156. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stanley, Christopher D. 2004. Arguing with Scripture: The Rhetoric of Quotations in the Letters of Paul. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Tasca, Luisa. 2004. Galatei. Buone maniere e cultura borghese nell’Italia dell’Ottocento [Etiquette. Good manners and bourgeois culture in nineteenth-century Italy] Florence: Le Lettere.Google Scholar
Zeng, Qing Gong. 2019. “Democracy Wisdom in Ancient China: Remonstrating with the Emperor.” Paper presented at the RSU International Research Conference 2019. Retrieved from: [URL]
Zhu, Ling 朱玲. 2005. “Gudai fengjian de yuyong celüe he xiuci renzhi 古代諷諫的語用策略和修辭認知 [The pragmatic strategies and rhetoric cognition of admonishment in ancient China].” Huadong shifan daxue xuebao 華東師範大學學報 [Journal of East China Normal University] (37) 61: 85–90.Google Scholar
Cited by (5)

Cited by five other publications

Liao, Guohai & Dengshan Xia
2023. Historical poem-quoting interaction: An interaction-speech act-ritual integrative study of fù in ancient China. Journal of Pragmatics 214 ► pp. 21 ff. DOI logo
Haugh, Michael
2022. (Online) public denunciation, public incivilities and offence. Language & Communication 87 ► pp. 44 ff. DOI logo
Haugh, Michael, Dániel Z. Kádár & Rosina Márquez Reiter
2022. Offence and morality: Pragmatic perspectives. Language & Communication 87 ► pp. 117 ff. DOI logo
Jia, Mian & Shuting Yao
2022. “Yo I am Superman, You Kiddo Go Home”: ritual impoliteness in Chinese freestyle rap battles. Text & Talk 42:5 ► pp. 691 ff. DOI logo
Zhou, Ling
2022. Self-denigration in Mandarin Chinese: An alternative account from sincerity. Language & Communication 87 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 21 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.