Political ‘advice’ in Chinese public discourse (s)

Abstract

The practice of 'political advice' covers events such as media appearances, in the course of which the representatives of a country deliver symbolic 'advice' to another country through a monologous announcement. As such, political 'advice' is a ritual practice (Kádár 2017): on the surface level it represents communication with another country and its style is formed according to this symbolic surface function; however, its implicit function is to form alignment between the political authorities who deliver the advice and the citizens of their country. Studying political advice provides a twofold contribution to politeness theory. First, on the empirical level, this discursive ritual practice has not received sufficient academic attention, and so modelling it through the lens of interactional ritual theory fills an empirical knowledge gap in the field of pragmatics and broader sense language and society. Second, by modelling the complex relationship between politeness and political advice, the paper delivers a contribution to the theory of language use, since it demonstrates that in certain ritual practices such as political advice, and arguably a variety of similar ritual practices in the political arena. It is challenging to capture 'politeness' in the conventional sense as an other-oriented (and interpersonal) form of pragmatic behaviour, in spite of the fact that on the surface level such forms of communication are veiled as abundantly polite and as other-oriented. We argue that one needs to deploy interactional ritual theory to model the pragmatic operation of this phenomenon. The data studied is drawn from the website of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

(Im)politeness and alignment

“…The indexicality of (im)politeness implies that in such genres (im)politeness may be directed at an alternative recipient with attributed agency rather than the ordinary recipients (i.e., the public). Also, such forms of indexical (im)politeness are contextually embedded and they may ultimately reinforce the aligning relational function of monologues (see Liu & Shi 2019, in the present issue).…”

“…On the other hand, their study raises questions that may not be self-evident in the context of studying dialogic data, such as how one can analyse the interconnection between rhetoric and intersubjectivity (Kádár & Zhang 2019). In the present paper, we explore the question as to how it is possible to capture the intersubjective nature of monologues in terms of politeness theory, through the understanding of politeness and alignment as dual phenomena (see also Liu & Shi 2019, in the present issue). Ours is a 'position paper', in the respect that we report on the outcome of an ongoing major project dedicated to the politeness theoretical study of alignment in political discourses (see Kádár & Zhang 2019; see also section 2).…”

Emancipating (im)politeness research and increasing its impact

“…By society, I mean 'members of society outside of academia who may not know or recognize' what pragmatists or linguists do as being relevant or useful to them (Bousfield 2018, 290). The contributions in the present special issue, particularly the empirical investigations into public political advice (Liu & Shi 2019) and public political monologues (Kádár & Zhang 2019), can benefit the existing practices and policies in the related occupational, legal, social and diplomatic institutions.…”

“…This work is illuminating and makes us wonder whether the disappearance of the three Chinese first-person pronouns (wu, yu, and zhen) relates to the simplification of social relations between interlocutors, a tendency also discussed in address terms in Chinese (He & Ren 2016). Focusing on the Chinese political advice, Liu and Shi (2019) demonstrate the difficulty to disentangle the behavioral types of public advice. They argue that Chinese political advice is genre or practice designed.…”

“…For example, to what extent is the (im)politeness practice in family-culture (Chen 2019) commensurable to that in clan-culture languages? To what extent is political advice in Chinese (Liu & Shi 2019) comparable to that in other languages/cultures? Does the disappearance of the three Chinese first-person pronouns (Lee 2019) result from similar sociopragmatic influences that also lead to the disappearance of the second-person pronoun 'thou' in English or changes of pronouns in other languages?…”