Item Details

A discursive pragmatic approach to the third person pronoun ta in Chinese computermediated communication

Issue: Vol 5 No. 2 (2020)

Journal: East Asian Pragmatics

Subject Areas:

DOI: 10.1558/eap.39165

Abstract:

This study examines the persuasive discourse of institutional accounts on Sina Weibo which contains the genderless non-standard third person pronoun ta written in the Roman alphabet instead of standard Chinese characters. Mandarin Chinese originally used the single character 他 (ta) to refer to the third person ‘he', ‘she', and ‘it', which later gave way to three separate written ‘standard' forms: ta 他 ‘he', ta 她 ‘she', and ta 它 ‘it' all with the same pronunciation. From a discourse analysis perspective, the study incorporates the ‘three-move structure' textual analysis methodology to shed light on both contemporary language use and one of the most under-studied interpersonal dialogic practices in Chinese computer-mediated communication: ta. The research shows that the environments in which ta appears are associated with two main goals: (1) generating monetary profit and (2) generating engagement with services/ideologies.

Author: Kerry Sluchinski

View Original Web Page

References :

 

 

Author. (2017). The ta phenomenon in Chinese social media (unpublished Master's thesis), University of Alberta.

Author. (in press).Genderless Narratives: The Pragmatics of ta in Chinese Social Media. In K. Martin (Ed.), The 2019 Annual Conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association: 2019 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. http://cla-acl.ca/actes-2019-proceedings/

Alber, J. (2018). They-Narratives. In Pronouns in Literature (pp. 131–150). Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95317-2_8

AL-ALI, A. (2009). LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE EMPATHETIC SHIFT BETWEEN ARABIC AND ITALIAN. Studi Di Glottodidattica, 3(1), 1-21. https://doi.org/10.3299/sdg.v3i1.1-21

Androutsopoulos, J. K. (2000). Non-standard spellings in media texts: The case of german fanzines. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 4(4), 514-533.

Argaman, E. (2007). With or without ‘it’: The role of empathetic deixis in mediating educational change. Journal of Pragmatics, 39(9), 1591–1607. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2007.02.005

Aurini, J., Heath, M. & Howells, S. (2016). The how to of qualitative research. Los Angeles: SAGE.

Bernard, H. & Ryan, G. (2010). Analyzing qualitative data : systematic approaches. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE.

Bhat, D. N. (2004). Pronouns. Oxford [England]: Oxford University Press.

Benveniste, Emile. 1966. Problemes de linguistique générale. Volume 1. Paris: Gallimard.

Brener, R. (1983). Learning the deictic meaning of third person pronouns. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research12(3), 235–262. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01067669

Chafe, W. (1974). Language and Consciousness. Language,50(1), 111-133. doi:10.2307/412014

Chafe, W. (1990). Introduction. International Journal of American Linguistics, 56(3), 313-316. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1265510

Chan, C. (2011). The Europeanization of modern written Chinese : a case study of the changing third person pronouns in the twentieth century and beyond. Bern: Peter Lang.

Chen, P. (1984). A discourse analysis of third person zero anaphora in Chinese. Indiana University Linguistics Club. 

Cook, G. (2001).The discourse of advertising. London: Routledge

Crismore, A, Markkanen, R., and Steffensen, M. (1993). Metadiscourse in persuasive writing: A study of texts written by American and Finnish university students. Written Communication 10(1):39-71.

Davies, E. E. (1987). Eyeplay: On some uses of nonstandard spelling. Language & Communication, 7(1), 47-58. 

de Schepper, K. (2015). Separating interlocutor phenomena from grammatical person. Journal of Pragmatics, 88, 137–147. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2015.03.001

Denzin, N. K. (2009). The research act: A theoretical introduction to sociological methods. New Brunswick, NJ: AldineTransaction.

Deringer, L., Gast, V., Haas, F., & Rudolf, O. (2015). Chapter 15. Impersonal uses of the second person singular and generalized empathy: An exploratory corpus study of English, German and Russian. In L. Gardelle & S. Sorlin (Eds.), Studies in Language Companion Series (Vol. 171, pp. 311–334). https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.171.15der

Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and power. London: Longman.

Flick, U. (2014). An introduction to qualitative research. Los Angeles: Sage.

Fludernik, M. (1993). Chapter 3: Indirect and free indirect discourse: aspects of anaphoricity and shifting. In Fictions of Language & the Languages of Fiction (pp. 107–221). Taylor & Francis Ltd / Books. 

Fuertes-Olivera, P. A., Velasco-Sacristán, M., Arribas-Baño, A., &Samaniego- Fernández, E. (2001). Persuasion and advertising English: Metadiscourse in slogans and headlines. Journal of Pragmatics, 33(8), 1291-1307.

García Salido, M. (2018). Referential and Non-referential Uses of the Third Person Pronominal Subject in Spanish. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 47(2), 355–376. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-017-9536-5

Gardelle, L. (2015). Chapter 4. Sex-indefinite references to human beings in American English: Effective uses and pragmatic interferences. A case study of your child. In L. Gardelle & S. Sorlin (Eds.), Studies in Language Companion Series (Vol. 171, pp. 69–92). https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.171.04gar

Gardelle, L., & Sorlin, S. (2015). Chapter 1. Personal pronouns: An exposition. In L. Gardelle & S. Sorlin (Eds.), Studies in Language Companion Series (Vol. 171, pp. 1–24). https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.171.01gar

Gast, V., Deringer, L., Haas, F., & Rudolf, O. (2015). Impersonal uses of the second person singular: A pragmatic analysis of generalization and empathy effects. Journal of Pragmatics, 88, 148–162. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2014.12.009

Goddard, I. (1990). Aspects of the Topic Structure of Fox Narratives: Proximate Shifts and the Use of Overt and Inflectional NPs. International Journal of American Linguistics, 56(3), 317–340. https://doi.org/10.1086/466161

Goddard, A. (1998). The language of advertising: written texts. London: Routledge.

Hobson, R. P., Lee, A., & Hobson, J. A. (2010). Personal Pronouns and Communicative Engagement in Autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 40(6), 653–664. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-009-0910-5

Hyland, K. (1998). Persuasion and context: The pragmatics of academic metadiscourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 30(4), 437–455. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(98)00009-5

Ishiyama, O. (2019). Diachrony of personal pronouns in Japanese : a functional and cross-linguistic perspective. Amsterdam Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Jaffe, A. M. (2012). Orthography as social action : Scripts, spelling, identity and powerBerlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

Janoschka, A. (2004). Web advertising : new forms of communication on the Internet. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub.

Kim, O. (2018). Interactional functions of demonstrative in Korean and Japanese conversation (unpublished dissertation), University of Hawai’i at Manao.

Knuf, J. (2003). This and that, here and there: deictic elements in telephone openings. Semiotica 145, 175–200. https://doi.org/10.1515/semi.2003.048

Köder, F., Maier, E., & Hendriks, P. (2015). Perspective shift increases processing effort of pronouns: A comparison between direct and indirect speech. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 30(8), 940–946. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2015.1047460

Kursell, J. (2010). First person plural: Roman Jakobson’s grammatical fictions. Studies in East European Thought, 62(2), 217–236. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-010-9115-x

Labrador, B., Ramón, N., Alaiz-Moretón, H., &Sanjurjo-González, H. (2014).Rhetorical structure and persuasive language in the subgenre of online advertisements. English for  Specific Purposes, 34, 38-47. 

Lakoff, R. (1974). Remarks on this and that. Papers from the Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society 10, 345–356.

Lam, P. W. Y. (2013). Interdiscursivity, hypertextuality, multimodality: A corpus-based multimodal move analysis of Internet group buying deals. Journal of Pragmatics, 51, 13–39. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2013.02.006

Landert, D. (2014). Personalisation in mass media communication: British online news between public and private. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Lee, C., & Tao, H. (1995). A social account of two unusual uses of third person pronouns in Hong Lou Meng. In Proceedings of the Joint Meeting of NACCL 7 and ICCL 4. T. Cheng, Y. Li and H. Zhang, (Eds.). LA: GSIL, USC. 179-188.

Li, C. & Thompson, S. (1979). Third person pronouns in zero-anaphora in Chinese discourse. In J., Kimball, and T., Givón (Eds), Syntax and semantics. New York: Academic Press, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 311-335.

Liu, X. (2017). Exploring the Rhetorical Use of Interactional Metadiscourse: A Comparison of Letters to Shareholders of American and Chinese Financial Companies. English Language Teaching, 10(7), 232. https://doi.org/10.5539/elt.v10n7p232

Lyons, J. (1977). Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139165693

Lyons, J. (1977). Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511620614

Macrae, A. (2018). Positioning the Reader in Post-Apartheid Literature of Trauma: I and You in Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story. In Pronouns in Literature (pp. 55–74). Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95317-2_4

Mignot, E. (2015). Chapter 14. Pragmatic and stylistic uses of personal pronoun one. In L. Gardelle & S. Sorlin (Eds.), Studies in Language Companion Series (Vol. 171, pp. 275–310). https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.171.14mig

Mithun, M. (1990). Third-Person Reference and the Function of Pronouns in Central Pomo Natural Speech. International Journal of American Linguistics, 56(3), 361–376. https://doi.org/10.1086/466163

Mukherjee, J. (2000). Krisis at Kamp Krusty - deviant spellings in popular culture as examples of medium-dependent graphic presentation structures. AAA: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, (2). 161-172.

Neary, C. (2010). Negotiating Narrative Empathy in Gandhi’s Life-Writing. The Language of Landscapes’ PALA 2010 Conference Proceedings University of Genoa, Italy. 1-25.

Obana, Y. (2003). Anaphoric choices in Japanese fictional novels: The discourse arrangement of noun phrases, zero and third person pronouns. Text – Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse, 23(3). https://doi.org/10.1515/text.2003.017

Parodi, G. (2010). Academic and Professional Discourse Genres in Spanish. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co.

Ran, Y. (2007). 指示语选择的语用视点、语用移情与离情 [The pragmatic stance of person deixis , its empathic and de-empathic functions in interpersonal discourse]. Foreign Language Teaching and Research (bimonthly), 39(5), 331-337 + 400.

Sebba, M. (2011). Spelling and society : The culture and politics of orthography around the world Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press.

Shi, S., Chen, Y., & Chow, W. S. (2016). Key values driving continued interaction on brand pages in social media: An examination across genders. Computers in Human Behavior, 62, 578-589. 

Smith, B. G., & Gallicano, T. D. (2015). Terms of engagement: Analyzing public engagement with organizations through social media. Computers in Human Behavior, 53, 82-90. 

Swales, J. (1981). Aspects of article introductions. Language Studies Unit, The University of Aston in Birmingham.

Toolan, M. (1990) The Stylistics of Fiction: a Literary-Linguistic Approach. London: Routledge.

Wales, K. (1996). Personal pronouns in present-day English. Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press.

Wang, W., & Akitani, H. (2017), Toward the Status Quo and History of the Third Person Pronouns in Chinese. 《漢語史學報》 “Hanyushixuebao” [ Journal of Chinese History], 17, 14-59.

Watkins, L. J. (1990). Noun Phrase versus Zero in Kiowa Discourse. International Journal of American Linguistics, 56(3), 410–426. https://doi.org/10.1086/466165

Willig, C. (2014). Interpretation and Analysis. In U. Flick, K. Metzler & W. Scott (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative data analysis. Los Angeles London England: SAGE. 136-149.

Xiang, X. (2003). Multiplicity of self in public discourse: The use of personal references in two radio sports shows. Language Sciences, 25(5), 489–514. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0388-0001(03)00022-6

Xu, Z., & Wang, Q. (2018). Pragmatic Empathy as a Grand Strategy in Business Letter Writing. English Language Teaching, 11(8), 14. https://doi.org/10.5539/elt.v11n8p14

Yeh, C.-L., & Chen, Y.-J. (2001). An Empirical Study of Zero Anaphora Resolution in Chinese Based on Centering Model. 1-15.

Zhan, X. H. 詹秀华(2013). ”TA”.  “shou ‘TA’”[Let’s talk about “TA”] 廊坊师范学院 学报社会科学版“Langfangshifanxueyuanxuebao (shehuikexue ban)” [ Journal of Langfang Teachers College(Social Sciences Edition)], 29(6), 36-38.

Zhang, S. (2016). “人家”“伦家”“宝宝的语义演变传播分析 [Analysis of Semantic Evolution and Transmission of “Renjia”, “Lunjia” and “Baobao”], Journal of Heihe University, 8, 141-142+145. https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1674-9499.2016.08.059

Zhong, Z. J 钟之静. (2015). 网络新词汇ta 的第三人称代词三分法意义的分析“Wanglouxincihui ta de di san renchengdaici san fenfayiyi de fenxi”.[Analysis of the three meanings of the third person pronoun new Internet word ta湖北科技学院学报 “hubeijiaoxuexueyuanxuebao” [Journal of Hubei University of Science and Technology], 35(5), 77-79.