| Speech act has always been a core issue in the field of pragmatics and philosophy of language.Advice has been widely studied because it is one of the common speech acts in daily communication.In the past,most researches on advice focused on face-to-face communication.With the rise of computer-mediated communication,the researches on the speech act of advice-giving have also been extended to the field of computer-mediated communication.However,the relevant researches are not sufficient.This study attempts to make up for the lack of researches on advice-giving online and analyze the speech act of advice-giving in the online forum from the perspective of interpersonal pragmatics.This study takes 200 responses from Tianya Forum as the analysis data and establishes a small corpus with the collected materials focusing on advice related to academic or career issues.The study conducts the qualitative and quantitative analysis on the basis of Spencer-Oatey’s Rapport Management Theory.The main questions of this study include:(1)What are the types of advice-giving in the online forum in discourse layer?(2)What kinds of rapport-management strategies have been adopted in advice-giving in the online forum?(3)What interpersonal functions have been performed by advice-giving in the online forum and what kinds of interpersonal effects are produced?Based on the previous researches on the speech act of advice-giving and the analysis of the collected data,the conclusions of this study are as follows:First of all,the study summarizes nine kinds of advice-giving in discourse layer,namely:(1)direct advice,(2)evaluative expressions,(3)explanatory expressions,(4)sharing experiences,(5)addressing terms and encouraging expressions,(6)inquiring the advice-seeker,(7)shifting the focus,(8)using hedges(9)offering help.In addition,their differences in online forum are also explored in the present study: according to the Chi-square test,sharing experiences,evaluative expressions,inquiring the advice-seeker,direct advice,explanatory discourse and using hedges appear more frequently than addressing terms and encouraging expressions,addressing terms and encouraging expressions are significantly higher than shifting the focus and offering help,which are similar in frequency.Secondly,from the perspective of interpersonal pragmatics,a case study is given to three important rapport-management strategies in illocutionary domain based on the corpus of advice-giving built from the online forum.It is found that unlike those responses without additional implications,the majority of the expressions provided by advice-givers in the corpus contain additional information.To be specific,the latter accounts for 82.5% of the total number while the former makes up only 17.5%.There are three types of advice-giving that contain additional information,which are addressing terms and encouraging expressions,shifting the focus,and using hedges.Besides,certain three types of advice-giving as hedges,shifting the focus and encouraging expressions in the corpus are more tactful than the other six types.They can alleviate the asymmetry existing between advice-seekers and advice-givers.Inquiring the advice-seeker,direct advice and evaluative expressions are the most direct,so they tend to have negative impacts on the face and right of the advice-seekers.The uses of upgraders reinforce the tone of advice-giving,but they inevitably threaten the identity face and equity right of the recipients of the information.Thirdly,based on the classification of functions of language by Brown and Yule(1983),we found that the speech act of advice-giving in the online forum mainly achieved the transactional function.In the present study,this function can be classified into saving face,inspiring deeper thoughts and encouragement and help.Interactional function of advice-giving in our data is expressed as shortening the distance and is fulfilled by sharing experiences and the usage of addressing terms.The result of chi-square test shows that there are significant differences between interactional function and transactional function(P<0.001).Specifically,cases of transactional function in the corpus occupy 78.24% while cases of interaction function account for 21.76%,much less than the number of the former.Therefore,advice-giving in online forum mainly performs transactional function.And further study shows that transactional function tends to present as inspiring deeper thoughts,though saving face and encouragement and help are also contained.By analyzing the speech act of advice-giving in the online forum,this study classifies the types of advice-giving in the discourse layer,studies the rapport-management strategies adopted and explores their functions and interpersonal effects.The results show that the speech act of advice-giving in the online forums can achieve harmony through the use of rapport management strategies,but the situation in online forums remains to be improved.The present study broadens the scope and horizons of interpersonal pragmatic researches to a certain extent.It also provides wider considerations for the study of advice-giving in online forums and also provides some practical guidance for promoting the construction of a harmonious and civilized online homeland. |
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