The Pragmaticalization of “Jiǔwéi” as a Reunion Formulaic Greeting and Related Phenomena

In Classical Chinese, the distribution of jiǔwéi (久违,‘long time no see’) as a formulaic greeting is relatively complex. In terms of discourse distribution, when used independently or iteratively to form a greeting used in reunion situations, it commonly initiates a turn, forming an adjacency pair with reflective responses such as bǐcǐ bǐcǐ (彼此彼此, ‘likewise’), pragmatically negative responses like qǐgǎn (qǐgǎn) (岂敢(岂敢), ‘how dare I?/ I don't deserve your missing.’), and other greetings including yīxiàng (yīxiàng) (一向一向, ‘recently’) and xìnghuì (xìnghuì) (幸会幸会, ‘it is my honor to meet you’). Regarding syntactic distribution, it can combine with long-time adverbials or high-degree complements, may appear in a serial verb construction with the semantic structure X+ \neg X, and can also be used iteratively. These syntactic features arise from the need to enhance expressive sincerity and strengthen the illocutionary force of greeting in response to meaning bleaching caused by frequent usage, representing a phenomenon of form renovation in its process of pragmaticalization. The pragmaticalization of the clause predicating jiǔwéi into the formulaic greeting jiǔwéi manifests in the degeneration of clausal syntactic form and a marked change tendency toward one-word sentence, among other aspects.