Categories And Techniques Of Directive Speech Acts By Chinese WeChat Official Accounts

As one of the five major types of speech acts by Searle,directives are attempts by the speaker to get the hearer to do something.Commonly found in interpersonal interaction,they have received extensive attention.Related researches revolve mainly around the contrastive study of an act in different languages or cultures,and the actualization of an act in a specific situation.However,the studies on directives as a whole category are comparatively few,and the literature on their categorization is even less.WeChat official accounts are important platforms for mass communication.The administrators of the accounts,for their promotion and development,normally use directives in the titles of their forwarded articles to elicit viewing,liking,reposting,sharing,commenting and following on the audience's part.The thesis,based on Searle's taxonomy,explores these directives in terms of their types and strategies.Of the twelve differences between different speech acts distinguished by Searle,interest and force are selected as the two-dimension criterion for the categorization of directives.According to the extent to which the speaker's interest is involved,directives are classified into four broad kinds,namely,expectation,invitation,instruction and proposition.Where force is concerned,expectation can be further classified into plead,request,demand and command,invitation into invite,appeal,dare.,and defy,instruction into remind,guide,warn and threaten,and proposition into advise,induce,recommend,encourage and urge.The thesis,citing directives by WeChat official accounts,exemplifies its proposed typology of directives.Additionally,it analyzes with examples the linguistic strategies used by the directives.The strategies are reflected in the use of colloquialism and netspeak,and numerals and adverbs at the lexical level,the preference for interrogatives and imperatives at the syntactic level,the application of figurative speech at the stylistic level,and the exploitation of metalinguistic comments and paralinguistic means.The employment of the tactics increases the diversity and novelty of the directives,and enhances the directive effectsTheoretically,the innovated typology of directives can deepen the understanding of directives,help differentiate similar speech acts and offer insights into the classification of the other four basic speech acts.Practically,the elaboration on the directives by WeChat official accounts can contribute to these accounts in terms of the composition of their directive discourse,and their maintenance and expansion.