A Diachronic Study Of Chinese Greetings Between New Acquaintances

As openings of interactions,greetings between new acquaintances serve to establish the interlocutors' relationship with each other.Although greetings have been studied extensively both at home and abroad,few systematic studies have been done on the diachronic change of greetings.The limited number of diachronic studies on greetings is also confined to the mere descriptions,which seems deficient in the research methodology and inadequate in the systematic explanation of the evolution of greetings.Therefore,the present study,attempting to be innovative in both the research object and the research method,investigates the diachronic change of Chinese greetings as so to provide a window into the social changes with quantitative and qualitative analysis.This paper adopts the method of historical pragmatics.Some scholars have shown that graphically realized texts such as literary discourse may display features of communicative immediacy to some extent,and thus deserve to be studied in historical pragmatics.Hence,this paper collects the data from Chinese literary works which are written between the founding of PRC to the end of 20th century.Also,the historical background of the story is approximate to the time when the story is written.In this way,the data can truly reflect people's way of speaking in that period.Due to the particularity of the Cultural Revolution in Chinese history,the greeting conversation between new acquaintances in the period of 1966 to 1976 is inadequate and thus this period is excluded from the comparison.Ultimately,the data are collected from 49 novels and contain more than 600 greeting conversations between new acquaintances.This study mainly answers two research questions:1)in what aspects do Chinese greetings between new acquaintances remain unchanged from the founding of PRC to the end of the 20th century?2)Are there any diachronic changes that have taken place in Chinese greetings between new acquaintances from the founding of PRC to the end of the 20th century?If yes,what are they?These two questions can help to gain a more comprehensive picture of Chinese greetings as well as social changes in China including values and culture.Through analyzing the sentence pattern,component,consisting of greeting proper,terms of address and greeting substitutes,as well as topic,this paper provides a diachronic and contrastive study of greetings between new acquaintances in two periods,i.e.the period of 1949 to 1966 and the period of 1976 to 1999.The findings have shown that there are four general features of Chinese greetings among new acquaintances that remain unchanged:1)the characteristic of information seeking or confirming in greeting conversations between new acquaintances remains unchanged in both periods;2)greetings between new acquaintances in both periods are semantically informative and unconventional to a large extent;3)greetings between new acquaintances in both periods are highly situation-independent,and in the corpus of written materials,greeting proper like nihao is not so widely used as it is supposed;4)the extensive use of kinship terms exists in greeting conversations among new acquaintances whether in the first period or in the second period,and the traditional politeness maxim of "self-denigration and other elevation" is by and large abandoned in modern China..Besides,it is found that three diachronic changes have taken place:1)Chinese greetings between new acquaintances show a tendency of"impersonalization";2)the frequency of the use of address terms in greeting conversations decreases in the second period,which is caused by the simplicity of the addressing system and the equalization of the concept about addressing terms,and the constant change of address terms which can be applied to all;3)the topic of greetings between new acquaintances changes with the social situations,and weather is not a common topic used in Chinese greeting conversations between new acquaintances.In a word,the overall characteristics of greeting conversations between new acquaintances that remain unchanged are closely related to the collectivism in traditional Chinese culture and values whereas the diachronic changes are influenced by the permeation of western culture.