Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics

Face, thanks to Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) seminal work, has attracted an enormous amount of attention in linguistic pragmatics. Goffman’s now well-recognized classic paper “On Face-work” (Goffman 1955; reprinted in Goffman 1972) has similarly influenced sociology. Interestingly, both works acknowledge their debt to the Chinese origin of face. Ho (1976:867) writes: “the concept of face is, of course, Chinese in origin, and the term is a literal translation of the Chinese lien [ liǎn] and mien-tzu [ miànzi] (cf. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary 1944; Webster’s Dictiona…

The Fāngyán 方言 ('Dialect[s]' or 'Topolect[s]'), usually attributed to Yáng Xióng 揚雄 (53 BCE–18 CE), a famous fù 賦-poet and philosopher, is a collection of dialectal and regional (including non-sinitic) expressions compiled during the end of the Western Hàn period (206 BCE–9 CE, Norman 1988:185). It is the first attested study on linguistic geography and dialectology in China, possibly even worldwide (Wáng Lì 1980 [2006]:17, Lǐ Shùháo 2004:1). Published under the baroque title “Dialectal Expressions from Foreign …

Fǎnqiè 反切 is a traditional convention for showing the pronunciation of Chinese characters, which are logographic and almost always monosyllabic in pronunciation. The convention uses different components in the pronunciations of two characters to put together the pronunciation of another character. Specifically, the initial of the first character combines with the final (including the tone) of the second character to render a monosyllabic pronunciation. For example, one may encounter the four-character sequence sǎo, sū lǎo fǎn 嫂, 蘇老反, which means the pronunciation of th…