Wǔxiá and Genre Names in Mandarin

The goal of this paper is to offer an analysis of the Mandarin genre name Wǔxiá, a name usually referring to a Chinese genre of narratives involving martially skilled protagonists and heroic deeds. We show that Mandarin speakers use Wǔxiá across different contexts as a genre name expressing subtly different degrees of context-based content. For instance, users in on-line conversations may label any fantastic-like fiction as Wǔxiá, but literature scholars use it for a historically well-defined type of genre with well-established cultural themes. We generalise this analysis to names for sub-genres of Wǔxiá narratives (e.g., Jiànxiá, Yóuxiá), and propose that they act as hyponyms of the name Xiá Wénhuà ‘knight narratives’. We thus offer evidence that genre names in Mandarin have descriptive senses that allow speakers to refer to genres, and to narratives belonging to these genres. At the same time, these names display the properties of nominals, including their participation in lexical relations such as hyponymy. We conclude by discussing how our proposal supports an account of genre names that reconciles apparently diverging linguistic and onomastic theories into a unified theory.