The present work examines the communicational features of traditional Chinese honorific and
rude vocatives, and applies the results gained to contribute to recent issues in the field of
theoretical politeness research. Recent studies of linguistic politeness research have shown that
(im)politeness is realised in communication not so much by how speakers produces certain
utterances, but rather how addressees contextually evaluate these. Opinions, however, vary as
regards the means by which the addressee’s evaluative process can be theorised: it is under
debate as to whether hearers can freely interpret every utterance, and whether evaluation is a
phenomenon that is similar in every language and society. The present article argues that
evaluation is a universal phenomenon, but that its nature differs across languages, as shown by
the fact that historical Chinese vocatives afford few possibilities for contextual interpretation
compared with the (im)polite vocatives of other languages.
