Open AccessConcession in Chinese proverbs
Author(s) -
Jun Wu
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
thélème/thélème/revista de filología francesa
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1139-9368
pISSN - 1132-1881
DOI - 10.5209/thel.63860
Subject(s) - argumentative , linguistics , politeness , realization (probability) , focus (optics) , expression (computer science) , computer science , sociology , philosophy , mathematics , statistics , physics , optics , programming language
This article studies concession in Chinese proverbs from three different points of view: syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. It is based on several previous works that focus on concession and proverbs both in French and in Chinese. To our knowledge, no research has been done on the concession in proverbs. Proverbs possess several peculiar linguistic traits that condition the expression of concession. The objective of this paper is to examine the realization of this notion under proverbial syntactic constraints as well as to highlight their logico-semantic basis and to assess their pragmatic effects. Based on our corpus of Chinese proverbs, the article not only concludes with the most common syntactic structures, universal logical formula, but also points out the argumentative force and the politeness present in concessive Chinese proverbs.