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From Utterances to Speech Acts

By Mikhail Kissine

"Kissine offers a new theory of speech acts which is philosophically sophisticated and builds on work in cognitive science, formal semantics, and linguistic typology. This highly readable, brilliant essay is a major contribution to the field."

--François Recanati, Institut Jean-Nicod



Academic Paper


Title: Yuling Pan, Politeness in Chinese face-to-face Interaction
Author: Ning Yu
Institution: University of Oklahoma
Linguistic Field: Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics
Subject Language: Chinese, Mandarin
Abstract: This book makes an important contribution to understanding the complexity of the sources of power that govern Chinese politeness behavior in different settings. To answer the question of why Chinese seem to be inconsistent in their politeness behavior, the author conducted ethnographic research in southern China over a period of eight years in the 1990s. Through discourse analysis of data in both Cantonese and Mandarin, Pan describes Chinese politeness behavior across three social settings – business encounters, official meetings, and family gatherings – that represent a variety of situations and power structures. Taking into account the social factors of age, gender, rank, ingroup identity, and setting, Pan brings in the perspective of situational variation and looks at Chinese politeness practice in the larger framework of social context.

CUP at LINGUIST

This article appears in Language in Society Vol. 31, Issue 2, which you can read on Cambridge's site .



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