A Pragmatic Analysis Of The Speech Act Of Criticism In Primary And Junior High School Chinese Lecturer-Student Talk

Criticism is one of the most frequently performed speech acts in our daily life, and is asignificant research topic of Pragmatics. With the development of Pragmatics in recent years,the study concerning speech acts has made considerable headway. Many scholars have madesystematic research on the speech acts of greeting, complimenting, requesting and apologizing.But there is relative paucity of research on the speech act of criticism and until present there isno research on the speech act of criticism performed by lecturers to students. Therefore, thisthesis is based on the speech act theory of Austin and Searle and the politeness principle putforward by Brown and Levinson. By collecting ethnographic data, this thesis attempts tostudy how Chinese lecturers perform the speech act of criticism and how students willrespond to it in certain conditions. Moreover, I also make a study on the felicity conditions ofcriticism, contents of criticism, syntactic structures, linguistic characteristics and pragmaticfunctions of criticism, which aims at going deep into the research on Chinese speech act. Inshort, this study has both theoretical and practical significance. In the criticizing process, if asuitable and constructive criticism strategy could be chosen, it can not only strengthen mutualunderstanding and foster harmonious interpersonal relations, but also solve the problemefficiently. Otherwise, the pragmatic function of criticism can't be realized and the desiredcommunicational results won't be achieved. The thesis falls into seven parts. The first part is a general introduction. It introduces the definition and range of criticism,and the research contents and the significance of this study. The second part reviews and makes comments on the previous studies. Based on theliterature review, we conclude that there has been a relative paucity of research on the speechact of criticism. Most of the research on criticism has involved comparative study betweenEnglish and Chinese, the perspective in this paper focuses on Chinese data and involves thecriticism from lecturers to students and students' responses. The third part serves as the theoretical framework of the whole thesis. Criticism is a kindof speech act, the theory could be traced back to the speech act theory of Austin (1962) andSearle (1969, 1979). And also the intrinsic characteristics of criticism is Face Threatening Act,Brown and Levinson (1987) theorize politeness as a strategy for mitigating threats to face inverbal interaction. Positive Politeness Strategy and Negative Politeness Strategy are two mainredressive strategies. The fourth part presents the research method and data collection method. The researchmethod for this study is descriptive research, which shares characteristics with bothqualitative and experimental research designs. And the data in this paper are naturallyoccurring criticism and its responses, which were collected using ethnographic approach ----the collection of spontaneous speech in natural settings. The fifth part is the central part of the whole thesis. It focuses on pragmatic analysis ofcriticism and its responses. In this part, felicity conditions for performing criticism, contentsof criticism, syntactic structures, linguistic characteristics and pragmatic functions of speechact of criticism are explicated. And also responses to criticism from students are studied. The sixth part goes further to explain lecturers' criticism and its responses and itsapplications. The social and cultural factors that affect the options of criticism strategies areanalyzed. The seventh part is a concluding part in which a summary is provided to pinpoint thecontributions and implications of this thesis.