Fifteen Eighty Four

1: Overview

In this blog series, we will provide an overview of the representative features of Chinese politeness in daily interaction. Instead of discussing conventional topics, such as the use of honorifics in business meetings, the famous concept of ‘face’ and other phenomena typically mentioned regarding Chinese politeness, we intend to draw attention to seemingly insignificant yet important aspects of Chinese social interaction. We believe that being familiar with these phenomena is essential to understand how speakers of Chinese use language in daily interaction.

Our blog series will focus on the following phenomena:

• How interactions in Chinese tend to be opened and closed?
• How small talk in Chinese is managed?
• How business is conducted in China outside of globalised workplaces?
• Why certain words used in Chinese daily interaction may sound irritating for foreigners, whereas they are totally normal and polite for speakers of Chinese?
• Why is it often difficult to translate certain seemingly simple ‘polite’ Chinese expressions to English?

This blog is based on our team’s research, allowing us to illustrate the topics discussed with authentic examples. We hope that by discussing these topics we will not only provide insight into Chinese politeness but also motivate the readers to reflect on their own native tongues.

We are happy to be answer any questions regarding these blog entries. We can be contacted at the following email addresses:

Dániel Z. Kádár (dannier@dlufl.edu.cn)

Juliane House (jhouse@fastmail.fm)

About the authors

Dániel Z. Kádár (D.Litt, D.Litt, DSc, FHEA, PhD) is Ordinary Member of Academia Europea. He is Chair Professor and International Director of the Center for International Cooperation and Disciplinary Innovation (‘111Center’) at Dalian University of Foreign Languages, China. He is also Research Professor at the ELTE Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungary and Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Maribor, Slovenia. He is author of many books, published with publishing houses of international standing such as Cambridge University Press. He is co-editor of Contrastive Pragmatics: A Cross-Disciplinary Journal. His research interests include Chinese linguistics, the pragmatics of ritual, linguistic politeness, and contrastive pragmatics and historical pragmatics.

Juliane House is Ordinary Member of Academia Europea. She received her PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Toronto and Honorary Doctorates from the Universities of Jyväskylä and Jaume I, Castellon. She is Research Professor at the HUN-REN Hungarian Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungary, Professor Emerita, Hamburg University, Germany, and Distinguished University Professor at Hellenic American University, Nashua, NH, USA and Athens, Greece. She is co-editor Contrastive Pragmatics: A Cross-Disciplinary Journal, and Past President of the International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies. Her research interests include translation, contrastive pragmatics, discourse analysis, politeness research and English as a global language.

Funding:

Our work was supported by the Center for International Cooperation and Disciplinary Innovation (‘111 Center’) hosted by Dalian University of Foreign Languages (Project number: D25023), and the National Excellence Programme, National Research Subprogramme, funded by the National Research, Development and Innovation Office of Hungary (TKP2021-NKTA-02), hosted by the ELTE Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics.