DEL ESCRITO DE DEFENSA DE LA ACUSADA

As alluded to in the preceding sections, studies show that many invitations consist of different stages and more importantly, offer and response strategies may vary across stages. To begin with, it has been found that I&Gs are often sequentially marked despite differences in elaboration (2.3.4). Supportive evidence comes from studies of offers and invitations in a range of languages and cultures. In addition to early studies in Chinese (Gu 1990; Mao 1992/1994; Zhu et al 2000), recent works include Barron (2005) on offers in English and Bella (2009/2011) on invitations in Greek, among others. For instance, Barron’s (2005) analysis of data from the free discourse completion task (FDCT) shows that offers in BrE and IrE can be realised over a number of turns and this was found to be true across all five situations she examined, including offering beverage.

Most strikingly, by analysing observation and role-play data respectively, invitations in Chinese (Mao 1992/1994) and Venezuelan Spanish (Garcia 1999/2008) were both found to be generally composed of three distinctive stages. The stages were respectively named ‘invitation-response’,

‘insistence-response’ and ‘wrap-up’ in Garcia (1999:397), corresponding to Mao’s (1994:82) labels discussed in 2.3.4. More importantly, as suggested by Mao’s terminology, politeness strategies tend to vary across different stages. Roughly, according to the author, the early stages, including (re)offers and responses, are negative or deference politeness-oriented while the final stage positive or solidarity politeness-oriented (see above). This three-stage form of analysis is adopted by some recent invitation studies such as Felix-Bradsdefer (2003) and Bella (2009/2011).

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Nevertheless, there appear to be some differences in their findings. First, Garcia’s statistical analysis of head acts and supportive moves shows that overall the Venezuelan participants preferred using solidarity over deference politeness strategies. Yet, a similar conclusion was not made in Mao’s qualitative analysis, which is favoured by most discursive politeness theorists (e.g. Mills 2003; Watts 2003). Secondly, in both studies the first stage of the invitational interaction was found to be deferential and third stage solidarity-oriented. However, in Spanish, preference for deference was replaced by solidarity strategies in the second stage while strategies in Chinese at this stage were repetitive and ritual in nature. This seems to suggest that quantitative analysis of head acts and modification strategies could be used to triangulate qualitative analysis of politeness strategies in invitational and gift-giving discourse. However, some weaknesses inherent in modern approaches to politeness such as the face-saving model used in Garcia (1999/2008) should be solved beforehand. For example, as exemplified by Terkourafi’s (2005) and Bousfield’s (2008) quantitative analysis (cf. Mills 2011:28), the context variation needs to

be carefully considered in locating and interpreting head acts and supportive moves.

2.5 Invitations and gift-giving in the history of Chinese: A research lacuna

My purpose of this section is to provide the primary rationale for my examination of invitations and gift-giving in the present study by showing that these types of offers in the history of Chinese have not yet been explored from a pragmatic perspective.

A survey of relevant literature indicates that I&Gs in the history of Chinese have been neglected in the pragmatics research despite their importance of understanding politeness in China (cf. Gu 1990; Mao 1992/1994; Zhu et al 2000). Nonetheless, other politeness phenomena such as directives, apologies and requests have received increasing attention over the past decades. To

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begin with, R. Liu’s (1986) and Skewis’ (2003) studies seem to represent some of the early explorations of politeness in thehistory of Chinese. Both studies examine politeness phenomena in mid-eighteenth century Chinese as manifested in A dream of red mansions (see above).

Among other notable contributions is Liu’s finding that face includes all that the self identifies with (e.g. close intimates) rather than being merely confined to the immediate aspects of an individual’s self. Moreover, according to Culpeper (2011a:25), this notion of collective face ‘is more neatly conceptualised by Liu’ although it is touched upon by B&L (1987:62-64). Similarly, by analysing the male characters’ directive speech acts in the same novel, Skewis found that unlike conventional indirect strategies in English such as subjunctive interrogative requests (e.g.

‘Could you ...?’), other linguistic devices including, for example, particles, reduplication of verbs and supportive moves are found to figure more prominently in the linguistic enactment of politeness in the novel. On this basis, the author argues that the concept of indirectness ‘has no particular value in the culture and language of eighteenth century Chinese men’ (Skewis 2003:161).

These studies, however, appear to share some theoretical limitations as Leech’s (1983) and B&L’s (1987) theories are used respectively. As reviewed in 2.2, relying heavily on Grice’s CP and the classic speech act theory, these traditional approaches assume, at least to a large degree, that (im)politeness resides in isolated utterances; (im)politeness lies with the speaker; and ‘some directives (such as invitations) are intrinsically polite’ (Leech 1983:106) or ‘intrinsically COURTEOUS’ (Leech 1983:134; original emphasis). As many discursive (im)politeness theorists (e.g. Eelen 2001; Watts 2003/2005; Locher & Watts 2005) argue, their definition of politeness has been severed from laymen’s notion of politeness, which is always subject to judgements and negotiations in contexts. Therefore, the most important contribution of these studies seem to be their finding of evidence for the inadequacy of the classic politeness theories

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in accounting for Chinese data. Unfortunately, couched in traditional politeness theories, these studies seem unable to explain their data adequately rather than simply attributing to cultural differences.

In addition to the above works, studies by Kadar and his collaborators arguably make notable contributions to research on politeness in historical Chinese (e.g. Kadar 2005a/b/2007/2008/2012;

Ruhi & Kadar 2011). As suggested by Pan & Kadar (2011), roughly two types of studies can be distinguished according to their focus. To begin with, on the lexical level (e.g. ‘face’ lexemes, Ruhi & Kadar 2011), honorifics including address terms (e.g. Kadar 2007) and other

‘unconventional’ terms such as idiomatic expressions or vocative terms have been extensively studied. At the discourse level, most studies have focused on ‘competitive’ speech acts whose illocutionary goal competes with the social goal (Leech 1983/2007), i.e. apologies, refusals and requests. While these are all examined in Pan & Kadar’s (2011) study, the first speech event is examined in greater detail in Kadar (2007). As regards the discursive nature of these speech events, for instance, the author argues that although the formulaic apology chiefly functioned to index and perpetuate social status there were also occasions on which ‘the speakers intentionally deviated from these to attain personal discourse goals’ (Kadar 2007:125). Finally, the speech event of requests has been explored although only one example is analysed in some detail. As requesting is a typical directive speech act, this study is complementary to Skews’ (2003) work reviewed above. Therefore, much more research needs to be done in this area.

It has become clear from the above review that there is an important research gap in the existing I&G scholarship. In terms of historical coverage, politeness phenomena in pre-modern Chinese remains largely unexplored as previous studies mainly focus on language usage in modern Chinese. Regarding research topics, scant attention has been accorded to so-called ‘face

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enhancing acts’ such as invitations and gift-giving in the history of Chinese. This provides a sound rationale for my proposal to reconstruct and explain invitations and gift-giving in pre-modern Chinese.