A Study Of Echoic Utterances In Verbal Communication

The echoic utterance is an interesting language phenomenon, which repeats the previousutterance from another speaker. It appears usually in verbal communication and plays animportant part. However, on the one hand, foreign linguists pay much more attention to thestudy of the echo question, which is only a category of echoic utterances according to thetraditional classification;on the other hand, it is hard to find a systematic and detailed studyon this topic in our country. Therefore, this thesis tries to study its definition, classification,characteristics and pragmatic functions in order to make it well recognized and understood.Moreover, the tentative analysis will focus on the production and interpretation of the echoicutterance within the relevance-theoretic framework.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one serves as an introduction which concerns subject, purpose and significance ofthe study, collection of language data and the organization of the entire thesis. Chapter two makes a general review of the studies on echoic utterances at home andabroad. Chapter three explains the echoic utterance from an all-around point of view. Firstly itstates the definition of the echoic utterance, puts forward a new classification of it, andsummarizes its characteristics. Then the focus is laid on the analysis of its pragmatic functionswith some examples. Chapter four analyzes the production and interpretation of the echoic utterance within therelevance-theoretic framework, which is based on the analysis of its pragmatic functions. Chapter five draws a conclusion and points out the limitations of the study in this thesis andthe direction of further research on this topic.