The Linguistic Landscape of Visitor Messages at the Tombs of Iconic Chinese Historical Figures: An Analysis Based on the Corpus from Three Kingdoms Figures

This paper uses a corpus of 150 notes deposited at the tombs of five Three Kingdoms historical figures. Drawing on Bakhtin’s speech genre theory, scholarship on address terms, and speech act theory, it carries out a coded analysis to explore how young people stage dialogues with these historical figures across three analytical axes: genre, address terms, and discourse function. The results show that the interplay of these three dimensions creates a stylistic continuum from reverent to informal. Genre establishes the formal boundaries of the message, address terms encode underlying assumptions about the writer’s imagined relationship with the figure, and discourse function defines the speech acts the writer performs. This whole practice operates like an “emotional projection mirror”, laying bare young people’s urge to find steady, unshifting emotional anchors amid an unpredictable present.