On Indirect Speech Acts

Indirect speech act theory is a part of pragmatics. In indirect speech acts the speaker often says one thing to mean something else. It is essential for the learners of language to know not only literal meaning of a sentence, but also its illocutionary act. So people can efficiently communicate with each other.This paper uses some examples to illustrate some functions and usage of indirect speech acts.     

An Interpretation of“Is He Living or Is He Dead”——From the Perspective of the Speech Acts Theory of Pragmatics

Speech acts theory has been widely studied in linguistics, but applied into analyzing literature works has been very few. This paper interprets Mark Twain’s short novel "Is He Living or Is He Dead" from the perspective of the speech acts theory of pragmatics.     

Indirect Speech Acts

一．A Brief Survey of Swi Act Theory the ref,rsd咖r．Inth。lasttwoorth。decad。,thest。dy B．Illocutlonmpact:theederlnt。dstoof speech acts has gradually become the domain use this sentence as an order,a request or aof great Interest and imptance 汕 the piece of咖0 to ask the hearer to close theprgutlst．q and sa(讪ngulsts．Since all dor”、lmpnge comrnunlcatlon relates to SpeeCh acts,C．Perforutlorlmp act:As a result,thespeech acts are the basic or minimal units…     

Investigating Pragmatics of Complaint Speech Acts in English and Chinese

The speech act of complaint is an important research subject of pragmatics,which is worthy of research among speech acts.With the development of research into speech acts,some scholars have performed investigations of complaints,but they have done little work on Chinese language complaints.Therefore,it is necessary to make a further study on complaint as a speech act in Chinese.This thesis is based on speech act theory and the politeness principle as an empirical study of the speech act of com plaint in Chinese.It aims to provide a more complete and comprehensive result of participant production of the speech act of complaint.     

The Necessity of Teaching Pragmatic Skills and Speech Acts in L2 Classroom

The current article mainly focuses on identifying pragmatic skills and speech acts,along with illustrating pragmatic failures in sec ond language learners.On the other hand,a brief discussion of the necessity of teaching pragmatic skills and speech acts is provided.     

Contrastive Analysis of Speech Act of Request Between Chinese and English Application Letters

This paper attempts to analyze the types and sequences of speech act of request in Chinese and English application letters.We regard an application letter as a sequence of speech acts.Considered as a text pattern of request,all three kinds of application letters contain the basic structure of request: alerters,supportive moves and head acts.     

Cross-cultural Pragmatic Analysis on Speech Act

The theory of speech acts tells us that when words are uttered,they perform three different kinds of speech acts.But cross-cultural communication raises a question that the same locutionary acts may perform different illocutionary acts and perlocutionary acts,and in order to achieve the same illocutionary acts and perlocutionary acts,people with different native languages may employ different locutionary acts to avoid the pragmatic failure.This paper aims to illustrate the differences on greeting,requesting,and rejecting between Chinese and Americans,focus on the cultural factors in language and cross-cultural communication,and using the fundamental cross-cultural theories to analyze the distinctions,such as Austin’s Speech Act Theory,Brown and Levinson Face Theory,Edward T Hall’s High-Context and Low-Context Communication,and Hofestede’s Value Dimensions.Finally,it tells the English learners to focus on the cultural difference in the cross-cultural communication to achieve the successful communication.     

The Analysis of the Four Forms of Indirectness in Daily Communications

The indirect use of language is a common,widespread phenomenon in daily linguistic communication,with an aim to keep a harmonious interpersonal relationship.Though indirectness manifests itself in many ways,this paper is to discuss the four different forms of indirectness in people’s daily communications with typical examples found in both Chinese and English:politeness,indirect speech acts,conversational implicature and figures of speech.     

Metaphor Analysis of Chinese Premier Wen’s Cambridge Speech

Metaphor is more than an ostensible decoration of language.It is an integral part of human thought of ideologized world.This article analyzes the metaphor use of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s speech at Cambridge in February 2009,in an attempt to display how the preferred metaphors serve the purpose of this speech and reflect Premier Wen’s construction of China’s situation.     

A Tentative Study of Figures of Speech Used in“Hamlet”

Rhetoric is a traditional discipline with a history of over two thousand years.Figures of speech play a pretty important role in verbal communication.People are attracted by"Hamlet"written by Shakespeare and his employing words and artistic enchantment.Shakespeare once learned classical literature,rhetoric,Latin and French.He is famous for his dramas.His language in dramas is rich and colorful and he is good at using figures of speech in his dramas.This paper explores some figures of speech and mainly focuses on how pun,metaphor and transferred epithet are employed in"Hamlet",in order to have a better understanding of the theme and the artistic features of Shakespeare.     

The Characteristics of Speech Act Theory and TEFL

In this presentation, a brief introduction sgiren to the speech act theory through examples.Lights are thrown on the importance of speech act theory in TEFL to develop the students communicative competence.     

Speech Act of Refusal-A Proposal from an Interlanguage Pragmatic Perspective

This paper is to present a typology of refusal strategies which may be employed in the analysis of refusal performance from a discourse approach.Some previous research carried out is reviewed in order to classify non-native speakers’ production of this speech act.Then,the suggested taxonomy will be described in a systematized way from an interlanguage pragmatic perspective and within a conversational analysis framework.Finally,it is emphasized that effective communicative competence plays an important role in the production of this face-threatening speech act of refusing.     

On Academic Conflict in Medical Research Articles

Objective:To investigate the distribution of academic conflicts, if any, in medical research articles. Methods:Twenty-seven and 25 medical research articles in the field of internal medicine were selected from English and Chinese respectable jour nals, respectively. Then, the speech acts that reflected a conflict between a scientist’s knowledge claim and another scientist’s knowledge claim were manually searched and recorded in each paper. Data were analyzed using non-parametric Chi-test. Results:There were 123 academic conflicts recorded in the English corpus and 49 Academic Conflicts in the Chinese corpus. Significant difference was observed in the overall frequency of academic conflicts between the English and Chinese medical discourse (p=0.001). Besides, as for the distribution within research articles, introduction and discussion sections were the sections where Academic Conflict speech acts were most likely to occur in both corpra. Conclusion:The Chinese scholars are less likely to criticize peers. Introduction and discussion sections were the sections where Academic Conflict speech acts were most likely to occur. Our results are in agreement with previous results and confirmed the claim that highly different cultures vary in their discourse preferences. Our findings are of pedagogical significance.     

The Role of Formulaic Speech in SLA Learner’s Spoken Language Performance

A controversial issue in the field of Second Language spoken English acquisition is which one plays a more important role, the formulaic speech or the creative rules? And researchers have long kept different opinions about the definition of formulaic speech. The present paper discusses the definition of formulaic speech, describes relevant empirical studies and summarizes some roles of formulaic speech from our own experiments, hoping to provide some insights for second language spoken English teaching and learning.     

Refusal Speech Acts in Chinese and American English

Refusals are frequently performed in our daily lives.Based on the speech act theory of Austin and Searle,with the theoretical frame of the politeness theory put forward by Brown and Levinson,It presents a comparative study of speech acts of refusal in Chinese and American English.The results show that refusals vary in directness with situations and cultures;On the one hand,both languages employ the three directness types,namely the direct refusal speech act,ability of negation and indirect refusal speech act,and prefer indirect refusals.The situational variability of directness in both languages follows a similar trend.On the other hand,Americans are more direct than Chinese.Furthermore,Chinese shows the lower degree of situational variation in the use of the three directness types.People’ s choices of refusal strategies are influenced by social power and social distance.From all these evidence,we maintain that the cross-linguistic differences are due to basic differences in cultural values.     

The Farther Image of the Hotel Keeper in Cat in the Rain—Analyze with Speech Act Theory

It analyzes the father image of the hotel keeper in Hemingway’s short story Cat in the Rain from the perspective of Speech Act Theoy.Firstly,it presents the frame work of Speech Act Theory.According to Austin,there are two types of sentences: performatives and constatives.Yule further presents the action performed by producing an utterance will consist of three related acts: locutionary act,illocutionary act,and perlocutionary act.Then it analyzes respectively the speech act of the husband,the hotel keeper,and the wife.Through the analysis,the daughter image of the wife and the coldness of the husband the reveal and accentuate the father image of the hotel keeper who is considerate to his daughter and gives his daughter selfless love.Furthermore,it unfolds a broader horizon for readers to understand and appreciate the story.     

Developing Pragmatic Competence in Chinese EFL Classroom

This paper aims at investigating effective classroom-based instructive methods that facilitate the development of pragmatic competence of the intermediate-level adult English learners in China,who have gained relatively high grammatical competence but low pragmatic competence.The paper starts with the importance and components of pragmatic competence.It then examines what should be taught to help develop learners’ pragmatic competence.The paper focuses on some explicit instructive methods adopted by the author in her conversational English class that may raise learners’ awareness of pragmatic knowledge and enhance learners’ practice of pragmatic abilities:1) Encouragement of learners’ observation of pragmatic phenomena by English speakers from authentic audio-visual materials;2) Discussion of linguistic variations for each speech act and strategies of carrying out certain speech acts according to contextual cues;3) Role-play tasks engaging students in different speech events and communicative actions.The effectiveness of these methods is shown by test results after at the end of the course.     

A Stylistic Analysis of Michelle Obama’s Speech at the Democratic National Convention

Delivering a public speech is to produce a work of verbal art.As other kinds of art,the intelligent use of techniques along with rich and true feelings makes public speech attractive.On September 4th,Michelle Obama addressed a speech at the Democratic National Party Convention for his husband-Barack Obama’s re-election.In the speech,many stylistic techniques are employed that deserve a specific analysis to exhibit what they are,and how they help the speech win an active reaction from the audience.The analysis will be carried out from four perspectives,namely,phonological,lexical,syntactical and semantic analy ses.     

浅析Direct Speech And Indirect Speech

本文首先解释了“Direct speech”和“Indirect speech”的含义,然后列举了直接引语变间接引语的六个变化,即标点符号的变化;连接词的变化;人称的变化;时态的变化;动词的变化;时间状语、地点状语的变化。     

谈谈英语常用修辞(英文)

Figures of speech is widely used in our daily speech and in ourwriting,though it is most often asscciated with poerry.Prose writershave known deeply that figures of speech not only brings freshness andcolor to writing,but also helps to clarify ideas.