Politeness in Historical and Contemporary Chinese

Yuling Pan is a sociolinguistic at the U.S. Census Bureau, where she directs multilingual research projects for survey research. Daniel Z. Kadar is a Research Fellow at the Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary. He is winner of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Young Scholar Award 2010.

• Acknowledgements; Preface Sara Mills; 1 Introduction; 2. The Myth of Chinese Politeness, Problems, Framework, Data; 3. Politeness in Historical China; 4. Politeness in Contemporary China; 5. The Transitional Period: What Happened to Honorifics?; 6. Deconstructing Chinese Politeness; Bibliography; Appendix I: Chronological List of Chinese Dynasties; Appendix II: Newsmaker Labeling in People's Daily and Guangzhou Daily; Appendix III: Fonts in People's Daily and Guangzhou Daily; Appendix IV: Font Size in People's Daily and Guangzhou Daily; Appendix V: The Chinese Extracts (With Simplified Characters; Transcription and Word-by-word translation); Index of Names; Index of Chinese Politeness Expressions.

This is an impressive book which is intended for both researchers in the Chinese language and also for non-Chinese scholars. There is a wealth of examples to illustrate the authors' argument and the book brings great insight into current and historical politeness, but it also forces readers to consider the way that status and deference play a role in politeness and impoliteness in other languages such as English.