Chinese “face”-related expressions in Peking and Teochew Opera scripts

Abstract

This paper presents a historical contrastive pragmatic study of the use of Chinese “face”-related expressions in Peking and Teochew Opera scripts. The rationale behind this investigation is that contemporary Mandarin and the Minnan Dialect operate with very different inventories of “face”-related expressions, and it is worth considering whether this difference also applies to historical language use, and, if so, how. Studying this matter is particularly relevant for historical pragmatic research because “face”-related expressions have been under-represented in the field. Our study is based on a corpus of nineteen Peking Opera scripts and a comparable corpus of nineteen Teochew Opera scripts, dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The results of our analysis show that the historical Mandarin corpus operates with a duality of the “face”-related expressions lian and mian, in a similar way to modern Mandarin, even though we also found differences between the ways in which these expressions were used in former times and at present. Yet such differences are eclipsed if we contrast historical Mandarin with the Teochew scripts where we found a very different “face” duality than in Mandarin, namely a duality of yan and mian. This duality also differs from what one can witness in present-day Minnan.