A Research Of Chinese Complimentary Verbal Behavior

The pragmatics which was established and developed in 1970s and 1980s is an independent discipline in linguistics and its research core was the application of language and it was also an interdisciplinary research area. The verbal behavior theory becomes the research core theory as a result of its vital significance. US linguist J.Searle enhances this theory to explain the human language communication theory. Basing on the theory of J.Searle, this article elaborates with the close combination of the Western pragmatics' speech act theory and the Chinese and with the extremely common speech act in people's daily life -- praise--as the object of study, and its language material is the drama and the film and television play lines which are very close to reality.First, this article introduces briefly the basic theory - - Austin and Searle's speech act theory, and then makes comments on several kind of speech act: the criticism, the praise, the apology and the request which are researched with the domestic application of this theory . Upon the research, it was discovered that it is not so solid with the sheer research of the Chinese. And so this article research plan is settled.Next, this article sums up four constitutive character rule for the praise speech act: The proposition content condition - - the storyteller makes an affirmative appraisal to the listener or the things that are related with the listener; The preparation condition -- storyteller thinks that its appraisal object has a true existence, this appraisal truly tallies with the storyteller and the listener's appraisal system; The sincerity condition -- storyteller makes the appraisal wholeheartedly; The basic condition - - storyteller expressed with an affirmative attitude to the listener or the things that are related with the listeners. And the article also makes a certain discrimination. With the theory of metonymy it elaborates that the things that are related with the listener is still about the listener and then the affirmative appraisal to the things that are related with the listener is a kind of praise instead of just being a general statement. Then, based on Searle's theory, the thesis holds that there are two types of compliments: direct and indirect. "Pure compliments" is composed of key comments and assisted explanations; while "integrated compliments" is compose of complimentary verbal behavior and other verbal behaviors, in which praise can be either purpose or means. The paper analyzes the components of "Pure compliments"—constitution of key comments and make-up and function of assisted explanations. Indirect compliments can also be divided into two types: conventional and unconventional. The former has special form and its implicature can be easily got through the literal meanings; the latter, whose discourse meaning can't be acquired simply through its literal meaning, can only be understood with the aid of some principles and some contextual knowledges shared by both communicators. With the help of Corpus, the paper conculdes that there are three types of conventional compliments: paraphrase, description and declaration. And the paper also finds out Grice's "cooperation principle " is the foundation of Pragmatics reasoning and analyzes why this kind of praise is widely used in real life.Finally, this paper presents the regulative rules for compliments. It analyzes five main context elements which influence the pragmatic intention: the speaker's understanding and estimation about the hearer, the relationship between them, the purpose of praise, the degree of correspondence between the praise's content and the fact and the occasion, and three regulation variables that achieve pragmatic intention—behavior variables, linguistic variables and non-linguistic variables. The paper puts forward four effective discourse strategies: implicit strategy, exaggerating tatics, factive strategy and lyrical strategy, which help the speaker maximize the pragmatic intention.