Politeness linguistic strategies in Mandarin and the syntax of discourse

This paper investigates how politeness in Mandarin Chinese is encoded in syntax, moving beyond the traditional focus on sociolinguistic and pragmatic perspectives. The study analyzes four key domains of politeness: honorific pronouns (e.g., nín 您), honorific noun phrases referring to the addressee, humble expressions referring to the speaker, and sentence-final particles used to mitigate illocutionary force. While often treated as lexical or stylistic markers, these forms are shown to be systematically integrated into the grammatical architecture. Building on the approach of syntacticization of discourse and adopting a feature-based proposal within the Generative grammar framework, the paper argues that politeness distinctions are encoded through formal features such as [FORMAL] in the high clausal domain. Content-oriented markers (e.g., pronouns and honorific noun phrases) are analyzed as bound variables linked to the addressee or speaker operators, whereas utterance-oriented markers (e.g., certain sentence-final particles) are restricted to root clauses, directly encoding the social relation between interlocutors. Evidence comes from distributional contrasts in embedding, binding effects, and the interplay between vocatives and pronouns. The findings suggest that Mandarin politeness is not merely a pragmatic overlay but a grammaticalized component of the clausal left periphery in the syntactic spine, providing structural loci for social meaning. The analysis contributes to theories of the syntax–pragmatics interface by showing how social hierarchy, respect, and face management are encoded in clause structure.