A diachronic study of Chinese greetings between new acquaintances

Abstract

In order to trace the evolution of greeting culture from pre-modern China to modern society, this study investigates 483 greetings between new acquaintances (GBNAs) collected from 6 works of the 17th-18th centuries and 9 novels of the mid-20th century. The results show that, in both periods Chinese GBNAs are highly situation-dependent and primarily performed in the mode of “seeking information - confirming”. The changes are first and foremost manifested in three respects. First, the GBNAs in the 20th century exhibit a tendency of “impersonalization” in terms of topic selection and the use of sentence patterns. Second, generally speaking, the GBNAs in the 20th century are semantically more informative. Third, the disappearance of asymmetric addressing and the decrease of honorifics indicate that the traditional politeness maxim of “self-denigration and other-elevation” is gradually discarded in modern China. It is argued that the evolution of GBNAs might be attributed to both the New Culture Movement and the modernization of traditional society.