A Discoursal And Pragmatic Study Of Chinese Prefaces To Academic Works In Social Science

Chinese writers have always attached great importance to "xu" which is an important type of discourse as well as a special mode of communication. Chinese "xu" is essentially different from its western counterparts "preface" or "foreword". However, the study of Chinese prefaces has never aroused the concern of linguists, especially discourse analysts. And tentative in nature, this paper is to make a macro description of Chinese prefaces from the perspectives of discourse and pragmatics, intending to enhance the understanding of prefaces as a special mode of communication and to extend the existent theories concerning discourse analysis and politeness (politeness in written Chinese in particular).The present research is confined to the study of Chinese prefaces to academic works in social science out of the consideration of several factors which have been elucidated in chapter one. In the paper, Chinese prefaces are divided into self-made and other-made prefaces so as to facilitate the ensuing analysis from the perspective of discourse. A reference is made to the notion of superstructure proposed by Van Dijk, based on which we hypothesize that the composition of Chinese prefaces of both types follows certain conventionalized frames and paradigms, but usually with permissible variables for the elements in the framework. Specifically, self-made prefaces always consist of four sections, namely specification of the writing background, introduction of the content, acknowledgements and self-evaluation and prospect. Likewise, other-made prefaces are made up by the same number of elements—statement of preface-making reasons, relationship specification, topic development and evaluation. After the presentation of the two hypotheses, altogether 105 (55 other-made and 50 self-made) pieces of Chinese prefaces are collected haphazardly with consideration of several sociological variables. Then a quantitative approach is taken to count the occurrences of each section so as to verify the previous hypotheses. The result shows that in self-made prefaces the first two sections as we have proposed are relatively fixed while in other-made prefaces the sections of topicdevelopment and evaluation enjoy an almost 100 percent frequency. In contrast, all the other sections are rather flexible in their occurrences in the data. It lives up to the expectation of our hypotheses. We thus conclude that Chinese prefaces enjoy certain cognitive basis and follow a certain conventionalized event-frame, whether consciously or unconsciously. This point can well enhance our knowledge of Chinese prefaces as a type of discourse and facilitate its comprehension. And it's a matter of course that the conclusion needs to be furthered and enriched by other studies of similar nature.However, our pragmatic approach focuses on linguistic politeness due to its opulence in Chinese prefaces to academic works. It has to be acknowledged that politeness, as a pragmatic phenomenon, enjoys not only pan-cultural universality but also cultural individuality. As a result of wide research on politeness, there have emerged several influential theories with strong interpretative force, represented by Robin Lakoff(1973), Geoffrey Leech(1983) and Brown & Levinson (1978). And the establishment of all these theories is mainly based on the observation and analysis of spoken English (Brown & Levinson's is a marginal exception.). However, the research object of the present study is linguistic etiquette in written Chinese, which justifies our consideration of the adaptability of the previous foreign theories. Domestically a number of researchers, represented by Gu (1990, 1992), Mao (1994) and Ji (2000) have conducted studies on Chinese politeness, most of which are theoretical argumentation rather than empirical studies. As a tentative empirical study, the paper avoids direct application of the previous theories due to their susceptibility to controversy. Instead, all of the linguistic phenomena of politeness in Chinese prefaces are categorized into three groups, namely overstatement, unde...