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Flattery in historical China

A pragmatic perspective

 | HUN-REN Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics
 | HUN-REN Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics
 | HUN-REN Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics | University of Hamburg | Hellenic American University
 | HUN-REN Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics | Dalian University of Foreign Languages | University of Maribor
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with HUN-REN Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics.

Published online: 6 May 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.24076.liu
Abstract
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 made about the prevalence of flattery in Chinese social interaction, in particular in historical China. Since little language-anchored research has been dedicated to flattery in historical Chinese, this study fills a knowledge gap. We conducted a tripartite analysis focusing on: (1) how flattery in historical Chinese can be defined, (2) how flattery was conventionally realised, and (3) how flattery was conventionally responded to. We also investigated how flattery relates to the phenomena of self-denigration/other-elevation and complimenting in Chinese.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Review of literature
  • 3.Methodology and data
    • 3.1Methodology
    • 3.2Data
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Defining flattery in historical Chinese
    • 4.2Realisation patterns of flattery
      • 4.2.1Flattery as an Initiating move 1: Unidirectionally Initiated flattery
      • 4.2.2Flattery as an Initiating move 2: Bidirectionally Initiated flattery
      • 4.2.3Flattery as a Satisfying move (elicited flattery) 1: Presenting/Requesting confirmation of the flatterable
      • 4.2.4Flattery as a Satisfying move (elicited flattery) 2: Ostensible modesty triggering flattery
      • 4.2.5Image building through a quasi-moral dilemma triggering flattering
    • 4.3Responses to flattery
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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