Data source

The data on which this study is based was derived from the trilogy of vernacular stories compiled by Feng Menglong (1574-1646). Among other genres of literature, the vernacular stories were chosen as the data source for the present research for the following four reasons.

Firstly, due to socio-cultural changes such as the printing technology innovation, rapid urbanisation, rise of the literati and middle class, increased social and geographical mobility, huaben xiaoshuo ‘vernacular stories’ emerged as a new genre of literature and were gaining

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massive and growing popularity in this historical period spanning more than five centuries.

According to studies such as Idema (1974) and Hanan (1981), vernacular stories diverged from wenyan ‘Classical Chinese’ because the latter was chiefly confined to written texts and, if spoken, to some formal occasions among the educated elite class. Secondly, vernacular stories are better suited for the present research because the ‘simulated spoken interactions’ (Jacob & Jucker 1995:10) ‘open[ed] possibilities of nuance in expression that were impossible in the classical language’ (Owen 1996:834).

Thirdly, there is consensus that vernacular stories were either transcribed from or written purposefully for stage performance and hence arguably the dialogues were phrased using a speech style (Hu 1980; Hanan 1981). In other words, the dialogues are able to provide approximation to the then naturalistic interactions. Finally, the social interactions in Sanyan took place in an extremely wide range of contexts. This appears to be especially clear in the diversity of the social background of the characters in the stories:

… the characters in the stories represent virtually every social echelon, from rulers to farmers, from scholar-officials to street peddlers, from students to hooligans, from Buddhist monks to Taoist masters, and from housewives to courtesans. (Ge 2011:184)

Hence, it appears reasonable to assume that the vernacular literature can provide a representative corpus of I&Gs practiced in the corresponding historical period. More importantly, this seems to suggest that the use of Sanyan as the database would enhance the generalizability of findings presented in the subsequent three chapters.

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Moreover, from mid-Ming vernacular stories were collected in compilations while in Song-Yuan China they were believed to circulate individually (cf. Hu 1980:132). Most notably, it is agreed that the majority of them were collected in Feng Menglong’s trilogy of Sanyan, ‘Three Words’

(cf. Hu 1980; Yang 1998). In the chronological order of their appearance, they are respectively titled Yushi mingyan ‘Illustrious words to instruct the world’ (YSMY) (originally named Gujin xiaoshuo, ‘Stories old and new’), Jingshi tongyan ‘Stories to caution the world’ (JSTY), and Xingshi hengyan ‘Stories to awaken the world’ (XSHY). For the purpose of this study, the computer-readable versions were used to facilitate data identification.

3.3.2 Locating invitations and gift-giving: A unified approach

This subsection starts by reviewing the debate on how to define invitations and gift-giving and how to identify I&Gs in empirical research. Building on this, two further subsections spell out the unified approach to data identification employed in the present study, i.e. searching for SAVs and manual coding that are mutually complementary.

To the best of my knowledge, identifying I&Gs has to date been largely assumed as straightforward in empirical research. Consequently, unlike studies (e.g. He 2012a:32-33; Leech 2014:186) of other speech acts such as compliments that are built on Holmes’ (1988:446) definition of a compliment, there did not appear to be definitions of invitation and gift-giving that have been empirically tested. To further complicate matters, as far as I know, unlike invitations in American English that are fairly formulaic (Wolfson et al 1983:117-118), there is no evidence so far that I&Gs in Chinese are, to whatever degree, formulaic. This may suggest that I&Gs in Chinese ‘can occur in an infinite number of different realisations’ (T&J 2007:107).

Locating I&Gs from extremely long literature thus calls for an innovative approach to data identification.

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Nevertheless, the recent advancement in this field of research is able to cast fresh light on locating I&Gs. Above all, an invitation is recently discussed by Leech as follows:

An invitation is an offer taking place in a hospitality frame; it means that S, in the role of host, offers to provide something nice for O in the role of guest. It may be an invitation to a meal, to a party, to stay at S’s home, and so forth. (2014:180)

This definition is extremely insightful (see also Edmonson & House 1981:131), but it is by no means impeccable in the light of recent scholarship. Firstly, by focusing on the ‘hospitable’

aspect of invitations, Leech’s construal does not seem to incorporate the possibility that some offers may be motivated by the offerer’s ‘self-interest’ (Wolfinbarger 1990:699). This is because instrumental offers, as argued in subsection 2.3.3, may be mutually beneficial and involve costs to both parties simultaneously. This is an important oversight especially given the pervasiveness of guanxi invitations and gift-giving in China (Yang 1994) although ‘the pure types of expressive and instrumental gifts do not exist’ (Yan 1996:45; see also Yang 1994:127). The above definition, albeit subject to participants’ judgements in contexts, can serve as a useful starting point for locating instances in empirical research.

Similarly, defining the gift or gift-giving is no easy task although theoretically anything valuable to the co-participant is a potential gift. For example, ‘any exchange of goods or services with no guarantee of recompense in order to create, nourish, or recreate social bonds between people is a gift’ (Godbout 1998:20). However, as Osteen (2002) points out, this definition of the gift begs a key question: is the gift given freely, or does it involve some (implicit) expectation of reward or reciprocation? Hence, ‘any useful definition of gift practice must begin not merely by

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describing behaviour but by analysing motives’ (Osteen 2002:2). Thus, instead of providing a definition of giving, my data identification drew on the structural features of the gift-exchange situations, i.e. the gift object; the sequence of giving and taking; the actors’ own understandings of the object, action structure and motives; and the rules or principles of governing their behaviour (Berking 1999:4; see also Sherry 1983).

A range of other sources also provided interesting insights into locating data. Previous findings that invitations and gift exchanges are often associated with certain social occasions. For instance, Zhu et al’s (1998/2000) studies show that affective gift-giving in contemporary Chinese occurs frequently on ceremonial occasions such as weddings and birthday celebrations. Furthermore, according to these studies offering gifts is often embedded in social interactions such as thanking someone for hospitality and kindness, attending dinners, visiting the sick, and visiting friends and relatives during traditional festivals or upon returning from a journey. Perhaps more interestingly, invitations and gift offers are very likely to be made when participants seek favour from an individual (Yang 1994; Yan 1996; Zhu et al 1998/2000).

Perhaps more importantly, drawing on recent studies of speech acts in the history of English such as Kohnen (2000/2008) and Volkonen (2008), a distinction was made between explicit and implicit invitations and gift-giving. As detailed below, the two types of offers were identified using different methods although both were ultimately subject to verification before they were finalised for further analyses in the subsequent chapters.

3.3.2.1 Locating explicit manifestations

In the present study, explicit manifestations refer to linguistic realisations of the speech act in which one or more illocutionary force indicating devices (IFIDs), typically speech act verbs

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(SAVs) are used. Classic examples include ‘I promise’ and ‘I hereby promise’ (Searle 1969:58), which are viewed by the philosopher as explicit performative promises. In the light of this, some invitations and gift-giving in the vernacular stories were hypothesised to use ‘particular conventionalised pragmalinguistic strategies’ (Culpeper & Archer 2008:47) or a prototype-like structures. This has been found to be effective in investigating speech acts in the history of English (J&T 2000; T&J 2007/2008; Kohnen 2000/2009; 2007; Culpeper & Archer 2008).

Therefore, following these studies searches for SAVs were performed to locate instances of invitation and gift-giving in the present study.

Due to the lack of comprehensive studies on Chinese speech act verbs as exemplified by Wierzbicka’s (1987) semantic dictionary of speech act verbs in English, Tongyici cilin ‘(Chinese) Thesaurus’ (Mei et al 1984) was used as the starting point in the present study. The category of social intercourse in the thesaurus subsumes, among others, two groups respectively entitled

“‘yaoqing ‘invite’ – yueding ‘arrange appointment – fuyue ‘attend appointment’” and “zengsong

‘present gifts’ – zengda ‘present each other with gifts or poems’ – juan xian ‘donate’”. To begin with, nine of the 20 (phrasal) verbs listed under the first group of verbs on social intercourse are SAVs of invitations, namely yaoqing, yueding, dunqing, yaoyue, teyue, zhaoyao, yao, yue and qing (Mei et al 1984:270-271). Unlike invitations, 41 SAVs of gift-giving are provided in the Thesaurus including, among others, zengsong, kuisong, fengsong, kuizeng, zengyu, zeng, song and gei (Mei et al 1984:277).³ To locate I&Gs, searches for these lexical items were performed despite nuanced differences in the meaning and degree of respect implied (cf. 3.3.3).

3 Some verbs including yuyue ‘book appointments’, juanzeng ‘donate’ and xianshen ‘devote oneself’ were discarded as invalid SAVs in the present study as these vrerbs apparently perform speech acts other than I&Gs.

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The underlying assumption of this method is that although an IFID does not necessarily appear in the speech act, its occurrence in the text would provide good evidence of interactants’

perceptions, the compiler’s interlinear comment (cf. example (10)), or how a certain act was talked about in this particular genre of literature. Consider Wierzbicka’s argument:

One does not boast by saying ‘I boast (that I am the best)’, or threaten people by saying ‘I threaten you (that if you don’t do X I’ll punch you)’. The primary function of speech act verbs consists in interpreting people’s speech acts, not in performing speech acts”. (1987:16;

original emphasis)

Here, the author suggests that in addition to the function of interpreting speech acts, an SAV, even if non-performative, may provide clues to an implicit manifestation of the speech event in the context. Every effort was thus made to determine whether an offer of invitations or gifts was actually made by scrutinising the context manually using Leech’s definitions and the four related but discrete components of gift-giving as the guiding criteria. Nevertheless, explicit performatives, as noted by many previous studies (Wierzbicka 1987; Traugott 1991; Valkonen 2008), may only represent a very restricted set of realisations of the speech events. This entails the use of a different method to identify implicit realisations as detailed below.

3.3.2.2 Locating implicit manifestations

It was assumed that many, if not most, I&Gs in Chinese lack a formulaic linguistic form. Instead, they were presumably realised by an infinite number of forms and are, therefore, more difficult to retrieve than those with IFIDs such as an SAV (cf. Valkonen 2008:247). To further complicate the matter, speech acts are fuzzy and slippery in nature, hence are subject to the discursive struggles between participants. A certain speech act, for instance, may shade into

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another (cf. Mills 2003/2011; Culpeper & Archer 2008; T&J 2008). With respect to offers such as invitations, it was recently noted by Leech (2014:183-184) that there are cases in which a polite offer turns into a polite request (e.g. Would you mind joining me for supper?) and it may sometimes masquerade as a suggestion or a piece of advice (e.g. Why don’t formula). Locating instances of offer, however, is not insurmountable. It may just need much more effort or time because ‘often only from context is it possible to judge whether A is for S’s benefit (a directive), for O’s benefit (an offer or piece of advice), or for the benefit of both (suggestion) (Leech 2014:184; see also Schneider 2003:181). In my study, this entails close reading of Sanyan from it’s very beginning to the last word.

In addition to the definitions of invitations and previous discussions about the fuzzy nature of speech acts in empirical research, inspiration was also drawn from the notion of semantic field that is widely used in studies on historical speech acts. Sufficient attention was paid to examining conversations (letters or message notes, if in writing), particularly those containing words and expressions within the semantic field of invitation and gift-giving such as yaoqing

‘invite/invitation’ and song(li) ‘give (gifts)’ and their various cognate terms. They include, among others, verbs (e.g. yanqing ‘fete’, sheyan ‘give a dinner’, kuandai ‘entertain the guest at dinner’, shouli ‘accept gift’, and huanli/xi ‘return gift/invitation’) and nouns (e.g. yinyan

‘banquet/dinner’, liwu ‘gift’ and renqing ‘gift/favour’.

Moreover, as indicated above, ceremonial and social occasions where invitations and gifts are routinely offered were accorded enough attention to locate the speech events under study. For instance, while reading through birthday celebration, farewell or welcoming dinners and festivals such as qingming, the tomb sweeping festival in China were scrutinised. To illustrate, example [5] in Table 2 provides the social setting, i.e. a traditional festival for the second invitation

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mentioned in the first paragraph of subsection 6.2.1.3. In addition, special attention was also given to social encounters in which a participant asked favour from her co-participant. This is because instrumental invitations and gift-giving have been found to be recurrent in this context (cf. 2.3.3).

Perhaps more importantly, recent findings regarding the linguistic realisations of offers provide useful insight into locating explicit and implicit I&Gs alike. (e.g. Aijmer 2014[1996]; Schneider 2003). Most notably, as discussed in subsection 2.4.2, a distinction was made between preference, directive and execution realisations of initiative offers in English including invitations (cf.

Barron 2005). Despite the lack of similar research on Chinese offers, it seems plausible to assume that parallel realisation strategies are used in Chinese. It was thus hypothesised that there are also three linguistic realisation forms in Chinese comparable to English ‘Would you like some Scotch?’

(preference question), ‘Have a drink’ (directive/imperative) and ‘I’ll buy you a cup of tea’(execution) (cf. Aijmer 2014[1996]:189; Schneider 2003:181-185; Barron 2005:144, 152-153).