Non-conventional Indirect Negation: Speech Act As A Pragmatic Strategy

Based on the data and literature of non-conventional indirect negation, the present study approaches the phenomenon in context of Chinese conversational communication, drawing on the Relevance Theory proposed by Sperber & Wilson. Specifically, five problems concerning non-conventional indirect negation are probed into, namely, its definition, classification, understanding mechanism, generating mechanism and intercultural differences between Chinese and Americans.Non-conventional indirect negation in this project is defined as a pragmatic strategy in speech acts in which its form and literal meaning is positive, but its implicature and propositional attitude is negative.Non-conventional indirect negation is classified into three broad categories in light of the meaning distinction in Relevance Theory: explicature (further categorized into prepositional meaning and referential meaning), presupposition (further categorized into semantic presupposition and pragmatic presupposition) and implicature (further categorized into implicature and weak implicature).With Sperber & Wilson's Relevance Theory as the general conceptual framework, we maintain that Non-conventional indirect negation understanding is an ostensive-inferential process of seeking relevance, involving three tasks: identification of indirect scale (explicatures), construction of contextual assumptions (concealed premise) and recovery of implicatures (concealed conclusions).The generative mechanism of non-conventional indirect negation is concerned with the motivation of statement and the need of mentality. It is held that there are four root causes for the generation of the acts concerned: face consideration, self- safeguard, aesthetic feeling and emotional expression.The investigation results show that there are some similarities and differences of non-conventional indirect negation between Chinese and Americans. The root causes of the similarities are common mental need and survival need of human beings. The root causes of the differences are the value differences: Nonassertive VS Assertive; Field-dependent VS Field independent thought; Hierarchical VS Egalitarian; Past VS Future orientation; Being VS doing; Affectivity-based relationship VS Instrumental type of relationship.This study will not only deepen our understanding of non-conventional indirect negation, but prove to be of enormous value to pragmatic studies, especially to Indirect Speech Acts Theory. Though it is based on Chinese data, the classification and discussion on the understanding and generating mechanism will certainly shed light on the relevant conversational phenomenon in other languages and in cross-cultural communication.