Chinese as a historical diplomatic language: A study of Ryūkyūan petitions

In this study, we explore historical tributary diplomatic language use in Chinese. For many centuries, China as a major power in (South) East Asia conducted diplomatic exchanges with neighbouring countries through a tributary system, using Classical Chinese as a lingua franca . Since Chinese tributary diplomatic language use has received little attention in pragmatics, we hope to fill a knowledge gap. We examine a corpus of petitions by Ryūkyūan diplomats addressed to Chinese officials when the Ryūkyū Kingdom was annexed by Japan in the 19th century. We analyse such petitions through the lens of ritual in a bottom-up way, by focussing on speech acts and honorifics. Our findings show that speech acts in our data were realised with a complex inventory of honorifics, and they played an important role in the persuasive rhetoric of petitions. Honorifics through which speech acts were realised often indicated the urgency of the requestable while at the same time subordinated the petitioner to the recipient, hence making petitioning safer. Further, we found that politeness in the tributary diplomatic documents by vassal states can be best approached through the Maxim of Self-Subordination, which is different from self-denigration in the conventional sense. Our results are relevant for research on language and diplomacy and self-denigration in both Chinese and Western languages.