A Study Of Mikhail Bakhtin's Speech Genre Theory

As one of the greatest Russian linguists and literary critics, Mikhail Bakhtin was very influential in 20th-century philosophy, social theory, and the theory of the novel. Among all the theories that he had proposed, speech genre theory is the core of his academic thinking. Based on previous researches from home and abroad, this paper attempts to explore the existence of speech genre in the consciousness of linguistic personality, its influence on real speech communication, and the formation and improvement of genre competence from the perspective of anthropocentric linguistics. Through studying the relationship between speech genre theory and stylistics, I aim to use stylistics to better understand speech genre theory and use speech genre theory to rethink stylistics. Theoretical approaches mainly include data studies, interdisciplinary studies and comparative analysis. After a close reading M. Bakhtin's all works on speech genre theory, I summarize the current state of research as the starting point and basis of my own study. Seen speech genre theory from the perspective of anthropocentric linguistics, I try to reveal the inner connection of speech genre theory and stylistics by combining language culture, psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics together. Through comparing speech genre theory with stylistics, I chase down where the two unite and further argue that it is possible to use one to understand the other.My paper can be divided into three parts:introduction, body and conclusion. The first part introduces the current situation of researches on Bakhtin's speech genre theory, theoretical perspectives and research task. Genre, the term for any category of literature or the forms of art, has been taken to realm of linguistics by Bakhtin and takes on new meanings which refer to all types of discourses, both oral and written. Speech genre theory has received widespread and thorough study in Russia. From 1990s on, a new branch of learning, Genristics, was born as the result of the research enthusiasm on speech genre in Russian linguistic circle. Many academic centers were established one after another, among which the most renowned included Sapatov, Moscow, Volgograd and Perm. A lot of prestigious scholars devoted themselves into the study of speech genre and thus formed a strong research team. Besides relevant articles on linguistic journals, what worth mentioning were six volumes of Genres of Speech, published by University of Sapatov from 1997 to 2009. Chinese scholars also paid certain attention on Baktin's speech genre theory. Research achievements ranged from reviews to doctoral dissertations, from academic articles to books, such as Zhang Huisen's "Bakhtin as the linguist", Cheng Zhengmin's "Bakhtin's poetics of genre", Ling Jianhou's Baktin's Philosophy and Text Analysis. From previous studies, three basic research areas of speech genre theory could be divided:traditional linguistic study, pragmatics of communication and functional rhetoric. These three different research directions enriched the understanding of Bakhtin's speech genre theory, made in-depth analysis on verbal and nonverbal genres and hold potential to answer some unsolved questions in linguistics. Meanwhile, these researches are not sufficient enough in some aspects. For example, scholars emphasized more on microscopic study than macrovisual study of speech genre, and made less efforts in polishing speech genre theory by the help of achievements in modern linguistics.The main body includes three chapters:the first chapter focuses on the background against which Bakhtin's speech genre theory was born and the connotation of this theory; the second chapter explores the existence of speech genre in the consciousness of linguistic personality, its influence on real speech communication, and the formation and improvement of genre competence from the perspective of anthropocentric linguistics. The third chapter studies the relationship between speech genre theory and stylistics. Bakhtin's speech genre theory takes the subject of speech as the core of research, which coincides with the basics of anthropocentric linguistics. From Bakhtin's point of view, speech genre exists in language consciousness of linguistic personality as a form of cognitive framework. Speech genre regulates and controls the process of speech communication to appropriate speakers'tones, modality orientations and speeches into typical circumstances of social interaction. As the outcome of repeated practices of various genres in each particular scene of communication, speech genre plays an indispensible part of communicational predication. Speakers'role and status are also very important, for communicational speech act should obey the rule of interaction between status and role. Speech genre reflects the way how human social communication is accomplished, which mainly manifested in role interaction of different speakers. This ability is not born natural, but formed and improved through long-term learning. Closely related with growing and living environment of language subject, the socialization process usually experiences development from simple to complex, from spontaneous to awareness. Speech genre theory provides unique research perspective in studying language consciousness; language competence and communication process and unites several subdisciplinaries under Anthropocentric Linguistics. On one hand, speech genre theory energizes stylistics of resources and makes it closer to life practices. On the other hand, the study of speech genre theory promotes the perfection of division of functional style and helps it surmount its limitation in development. What's more crucial is that speech genre theory could be connected with stylistics of resources, functional stylistics and passage rhetoric and offer useful guidance to the foreign language teaching. The application value of this theory is part of the reason why I chose this topic.From previous analysis, some conclusions can be drawn:speech genre theory, as a universal language theory, holds great interpretative potential and shows impressive results in solving language problems. This theory integrates other theories under anthropocentric linguistics and greatly influences the development of anthropocentric linguistics. For stylistics, Bakhtin's speech genre theory provides theoretical bases for the further development of current study of stylistics. At the same time, from the law of development of functional stylistics, it is necessary to research diverse speech genre to test and prove some linguistic propositions and statements. Stylistics is an interdisciplinary subject which serves as the proper point cut for penetrating researches on linguistics. What's more, stylistics could draw on the research approaches of speech genre theory, the alternation of deductive methods and inductive methods paving ways to the expansion of stylistics.