A discursive pragmatic approach to the third person pronoun ta in Chinese computermediated communication
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/eap.39165Keywords:
non-standard spelling, sina weibo, chinese social media, rhetorical move analysis, ta, third person pronoun, pragmaticsAbstract
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 (ta) to refer to the third person ‘he', ‘she', and ‘it', which later gave way to three separate written ‘standard' forms: ta ‘he', ta ‘she', and ta ‘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.
References
Alber, J. (2018). They-narratives. In A. Gibbons & A. Macrae (Eds.), Pronouns in literature (pp. 131–150). London: 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.
Androutsopoulos, J. K. (2000). Non-standard spellings in media texts: The case of German fanzines. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 4(4), 514–533. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9481.00128
Androutsopoulos, J. K. (2013). Online data collection. In C. Mallinson, B. Childs, & G. Van Herk (Eds.), Data collection in sociolinguistics : Methods and applications (pp. 236–249) New York: Routledge.
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, CA: SAGE.
Benveniste, E. (1966). Problèmes de linguistique Générale (Vol. 1). Paris: Gallimard.
Bhat, D. N. (2004). Pronouns. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brener, R. (1983). Learning the deictic meaning of third person pronouns. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 12(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. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Linguistics Club.
Cook, G. (2001). The discourse of advertising. London: Routledge.
Crismore, A., Markkanen, R., & Steffensen, M. (1993). Metadiscourse in persuasive writing: A study of texts written by American and Finnish university students. Written Communication, 10(1): 39-71. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088393010001002
Davies, E. E. (1987). Eyeplay: On some uses of nonstandard spelling. Language & Communication, 7(1), 47–58. https://doi.org/10.1016/0271-5309(87)90013-9
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: Aldine Transaction.
Deringer, L., Gast, V., Haas, F., & Rudolf, O. (2015). 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.), The pragmatics of personal pronouns (pp. 311–334). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 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). Indirect and free indirect discourse: Aspects of anaphoricity and shifting. In Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction (pp. 107–221). London: Routledge.
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. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0378-2166(01)80026-6
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). 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.), The pragmatics of personal pronouns (pp. 355–376). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.171.04gar
Gardelle, L., & Sorlin, S. (2015). Personal pronouns: An exposition. In L. Gardelle & S. Sorlin (Eds.), The pragmatics of personal pronouns (pp. 1–24). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 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
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: John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.344
Jaffe, A. M. (2012). Orthography as social action: Scripts, spelling, identity and power. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781614511038
Janoschka, A. (2004). Web advertising: New forms of communication on the Internet. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kim, O. (2018). Interactional functions of demonstrative in Korean and Japanese conversation (unpublished dissertation). University of Hawai’i at Manoa.
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
Kroeber-Riel, Werner, & Esch, Franz Rudolf (2000). Strategie und Technik der Werbung: Verhaltenswissenschaftliche Ansätze. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.
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. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2013.10.002
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. https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.240
Lee, C., & Tao, H. (1995). A social account of two unusual uses of third person pronouns in Hong Lou Meng. In T. Cheng, Y. Li, & H. Zhang (Eds.), Proceedings of the Joint Meeting of NACCL 7 and ICCL 4 (pp. 179–188). Los Angeles, CA: Graduate Students in Linguistics, University of Southern California.
Li, C., & Thompson, S. (1979). Third-person pronouns and zero-anaphora in Chinese discourse. In T. Givon (Ed.), Syntax and semantics: Vol. 12. Discourse and Syntax (pp. 311–335). New York: Academic Press, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004368897_014
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. (1977a). Semantics (Vol 1). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139165693
Lyons, J. (1977b). Semantics (Vol 2). 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 A. Gibbons & A. Macrae (Eds.), Pronouns in Literature (pp. 55–74). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95317-2_4
Mignot, E. (2015). Pragmatic and stylistic uses of personal pronoun one. In L. Gardelle & S. Sorlin (Eds.), The pragmatics of personal pronouns (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. In 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 & Talk, 23(3), 405–443. 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). zhishiyu xuanze de yuyongshidian, yuyong yiqing yu liqing [The pragmatic stance of person deixis , its empathic and de-empathic functions in interpersonal discourse]. Foreign Language Teaching and Research, 39(5), 331–337 + 400.
Sebba, M. (2011). Spelling and society: The culture and politics of orthography around the world. Cambridge: 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. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.04.017
Sluchinski, K. (2017). The ta phenomenon in Chinese social media (unpublished Master’s thesis). University of Alberta. https://doi.org/10.7939/R3P26QG1G
Sluchinski, K. (2019). Genderless you-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. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.11362526
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. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.05.060
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: Cambridge University Press.
Wang, W., & Akitani, H. (2017). Toward the status quo and history of the third person pronouns in Chinese. 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 (pp. 136–149). Los Angeles: SAGE. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446282243.n10
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
Yeh, C.-L., & Chen, Y.-J. (2001). An empirical study of zero anaphora resolution in Chinese based on centering model. 1-15. Proceedings of Research on Computational Linguistics Conference XIV, 1–15. https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/O01-1011
Zhan, X. H. (2013). shuo ‘TA’ [An analysis of “TA”] Langfangshifanxueyuanxuebao (shehuikexue ban) [Journal of Langfang Teachers College(Social Sciences Edition)], 29(6), 36–38.
Zhang, S. (2016). “renjia” “lunjia” “baobao” de yuyi yanbian chuanbo fenxi [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. (2015). wanglouxincihui ta de di san renchengdaici sanfenfa yiyi de fenxi [Analysis of the three meanings of the new Internet word third person pronoun ta]. hubeikejixueyuanxuebao [Journal of Hubei University of Science and Technology], 35(5), 77–79.
