To Be Headed for the West, Riding a Crane: Chinese Pragmemes in the Wake of Someone’s Passing

Abstract

Jia he xi gui 駕鶴西歸 ‘to be headed for the West, riding a crane’ is among those words and phrases that Chinese employ in mentioning someone’s passing. Words and phrases such as this not only represent culturally and socially appropriate expressions featured in the wake of someone’s passing but, pragmatically speaking, they also form part of a tactful set of situation- and context-bound pragmatic acts which should be used around the event of death. This chapter presents an overview of the range of pragmatic acts that Chinese typically exploit to express the pragmeme in connection with the event of death. Important extralinguistic pragmatic acts besides speech that are integral to Chinese interactions surrounding this unfortunate event are also taken into consideration.

To articulate the pragmemes as represented by the pragmatic acts, this chapter adopts the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), as advanced by Anna Wierzbicka, as the theoretical framework. The NSM is, essentially, a set of semantically basic and universally identifiable primitive concepts or “primes” which can be used to reduce culturally complex meanings – including meanings of pragmemes – into semantically simple elucidations. Preliminary findings indicate that Chinese socio-cultural conventions encourage an emotionally expressive yet indirect style of interactions in the wake of someone’s passing, in a way which is consistent with the hierarchical relationship between the deceased and the living.

Wei zhi sheng, yan zhi si?

未知生, 焉知死?

‘How can we know death if we don’t know how to live?’ (Confucius, The Analects)