Political ‘advice’ in Chinese public discourse (s)

Liu, Fengguang and Shi, Wenrui (2019) Political ‘advice’ in Chinese public discourse (s). Acta Linguistica Academica, 66 (2). pp. 209-228. ISSN 2559-8201

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Abstract

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.

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