Nomination Characteristics of Titles in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literary Works

Abstract

The title is the first linguistic signal that a literary work sends to its readers and also serves as the threshold through which they enter the text. Drawing on a corpus of 1,000 titles of Chinese literary works from the May Fourth Movement period to the present, this article employs statistical, analytical and descriptive methods to identify the most common naming bases of literary titles. Building on Ma MingChun’s five-category model, the study expands the framework into seven categories by separating abstract concepts as an independent group, thereby to provide a more accurate account of the symbolic nature of literary titles. In addition to mapping the overall naming tendencies, the article also discusses the pragmatic functions of titles from a paratextual perspective, showing that titles not only identify works but also orient expectations and shape the reader’s initial reception of the text.