Exploring Image Work in Chinese Communication

Edited By: Xinren Chen, Yingzhe Jin

£83.99

This book reveals how people in contemporary Chinese society perform image work to achieve their goals. Empirical studies of doctors, celebrities, and officials provide a unique portrayal of Chinese society and its way of communication.

This edited book provides a reasonably systematic picture of image work in the context of contemporary Chinese society. It distinguishes itself by demonstrating how Chinese…

This edited book provides a reasonably systematic picture of image work in the context of contemporary Chinese society. It distinguishes itself by demonstrating how Chinese people perform various types of image work discursively to achieve transactional or interactional goals. Included are a collection of empirical studies concerning image construction and its functions among people such as doctors, celebrities, advertisers, medical consultants, and officials in Chinese society. The findings of these studies may contribute to existing scholarship on image research in general and dynamic discursive approaches to image in particular. Furthermore, it will conduce to an interpersonal pragmatic portrayal of Chinese society and its way of communication.

Xinren Chen is Professor of Linguistics and Executive Director of the China Research Center for Language Strategies at Nanjing University, China. He is Editor of East Asian Pragmatics and Associate Editor of Pragmatics. He has published extensively in Chinese journals as well as in international ones such as Journal of Pragmatics, Pragmatics, Lingua, English for Academic Purposes, and Acta Linguistica. His major monographs, in Chinese or in English, include The Pragmatics of Interactional Overinformativeness (2004), Critical Pragmatic Studies on Chinese Public Discourse (2020), and Exploring Identity Work in Chinese Communication (2021). He also edits some books such as Politeness across Chinese Genres (2017), Metapragmatics and the Chinese Language (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022), and East Asian Pragmatics: Commonalities and Variations (2023).

Yingzhe Jin is a Lecturer in the Department of Applied Foreign Language Studies at Nanjing University in China. Her field of work is interpersonal pragmatics, specifically Chinese politeness, rapport, and (self-)image. She has published in international journals such as Journal of Pragmatics and Chinese journals such as Foreign Language Education, Foreign Language Learning Theory and Practice, and Linguistic Research.

Wenjing Feng, Yadong Guo, Yingzhe Jin, Mengxin Li, Liu Hao, Xiaohong Liu, Junfang Mu, Xueyu Wang, Hongqiang Zhu