Chinese Students' Compressive Family Narratives

The article deals with the material collected as a result of a survey in which respondents - Chinese students aged 17-26 - were asked to tell about their families and older generations (the second part of the questionnaire), and indicate their family members and the circle of family communication (the first part of the questionnaire). The purpose of our study was to explore what do the modern Chinese citizens say about their families and how they do it when they are asked to answer the relevant questions in the questionnaire. This method assumes the brevity (laconism) of the answers, which allows the researcher to collect rich material of compressive (as brief as possible) messages on a given topic. To achieve this goal, we solved the following tasks: 1) described and terminologically determined the variety of narratives presented in the collected questionnaires; 2) revealed the presence and frequency of various types of family narratives in the collected materials; 3) analyzed the structure and content of each group of family narratives. From the point of view of the addressees, we classify all the respondents' answers in the second part of the questionnaire as compressive family narratives, since each of them "hides" (and can reveal) a whole family history. These are brief, extremely "compressed" descriptions of everything that relates to the family: itself, it subjects, relationships within it, etc. For the speaker / writer every word in such a description contains a whole story with numerous references to the past, but the recipient of information perceives only those things that have been said / written directly, taking into account the experience and knowledge that he / she possesses. Therefore, from the point of view of the recipient of information, we divided all statements into four types: narrative, descriptive, narrative-descriptive and indicatory ones. Compressive family narratives were also analyzed from the point of view of communicative syntax, resorting to the classification proposed by V.S. Pan-filov in his article "Communicative syntax of Chinese language". The present article examined not only how respondents talk about their family, but also what they convey, i.e. what kind of information about their families and its subjects they transmit outside (in extra-family discourse). The answers in the first part of the questionnaire make it possible to judge whom the respondents - young citizens of the People's Republic of China - consider to be their families and which relatives they maintain communication with.

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