Diachronic change of rapport orientation and sentence-periphery in Mandarin

Abstract

This article provides a corpus-based analysis of formal structure and rapport orientation of evaluative speech acts in written Mandarin starting from the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) leading up to the present. It focuses on illocutional concurrences (IC) where the change of rapport management with the interlocutor significantly correlates with evaluative speech acts. The IC are holistic patterns that emerge at various levels of an utterance. They contribute both locally (i.e. at the morphosyntactic level) and peripherally (i.e. at the illocutionary level) to the encoding of contextually and temporally situated speech acts or pragmemes. Mixed methods of hierarchical clustering and multiple correspondence analysis indicate that the recent history of evaluative speech acts in written Chinese is characterised by a shift from prevalently rapport-maintaining orientation to utterances more overtly marked for (im-)politeness. Evaluative language in written Mandarin became less mitigated at the structural level and increasingly oriented towards rapport enhancement and rapport challenge. This shift significantly intersects with a progressive replacement of clause-final particles during the 20th century, especially after the so-called ‘May the 4th Movement’.