Semiotic rhetoric of gift giving in ancient China

Abstract

Abstract This paper examines the signifying mechanism of gift-giving in ancient China from the perspective of semiotic rhetoric, aiming to answer the question of what can be regarded as li (roughly meaning ceremony, rite, courtesy, or gift) or, in other words, how the social meaning of gifts is constructed in giving semiosis. It describes four dominant rhetorical devices that existed in ritual and non-ritual gift exchanges in ancient China. The ritual gift tended to adopt simile and conceit as its meaning-construction device, becoming a symbolic good beyond ‘thingness’ and thus fulfilling the sociocultural function of ritual. Non-ritual giving activity made use of semiotic metonymy and synecdoche as a strategy of ‘indirectness’ to maintain the relationship between the giver and receiver in daily communications.