Fengguang Liu
List of John Benjamins publications in which Fengguang Liu is involved.
2026 Unsolicited advice in mediatised Chinese New Year celebrations: An interaction ritual approach Pragmatics: Online-First Articles | Article
This study investigates advice-giving during Chinese New Year family celebrations when older relatives tend to provide unsolicited advice for younger family members. First, we consider New Year advice featured in social media recordings through the lens of interaction ritual, using a corpus of… read more
2025 Complaining in historical Chinese criminal trials Journal of Historical Pragmatics 26:3, pp. 438–466 | Article
This study examines late-imperial Chinese criminal trials, starting from the observation that, in historical Chinese criminal trials, the speech act Complain is not only surprisingly frequent but is also often realised by the magistrate conducting the trial. We examine Complains in a corpus… read more
2025 Flattery in historical China: A pragmatic perspective Pragmatics: Online-First Articles | Article
In this study we examine how flattery was realised in historical Chinese interactions. We bring together ritual, speech acts and interaction, studying a corpus of interactions drawn from the late imperial satirical novel Guanchang Xianxing Ji 官场现形记 (‘Officialdom Unmasked’). Many claims have been… read more
2025 Crazy literature: A case of mock self-impoliteness Pragmatics 35:4, pp. 579–603 | Article
In this paper, we investigate crazy literature, a newly emerged genre on Chinese Internet in which posters portray themselves as being mentally instable or, simply, insane. Based on data collected from the Internet and findings from a survey of college students, we argue that the image created… read more
2023 Historical language use in Europe from a contrastive pragmatic perspective: An exploratory case study of letter closings Politeness in and across Historical Europe, Paternoster, Annick, Gudrun Held and Dániel Z. Kádár (eds.), pp. 143–159 | Article
This paper presents a case study which brings together the fields of contrastive pragmatics and historical pragmatics. Specifically, we contrastively investigate the ways in which the speech act set of “farewell” – representing the closing phase of an interaction – was realised in… read more
2021 Admonishing: A paradoxical pragmatic behaviour in ancient China Pragmatics 31:2, pp. 173–197 | Article
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… read more