A Study Of The Organizational Structures Of The Chinese Speech Act Of Invitation From The Perspective Of Politeness

As a commisive directive speech act which is performed with a series of utterances(Gu,1992),the speech act of invitation,where the hearer is the principal beneficiary,is increasingly studied in the scope of pragmatics,with more focuses on its realizations,strategies,gender differences in the context of a certain language or across different languages by eliciting questionnaires,discourse completion tests,etc.However,in the Chinese context,few studies systematically demonstrate how an invitation is construed and generated through the analyses of naturally-occurring utterances.Therefore,this study adopts a corpus-based method with conversation analysis to probe into(1)turn-taking patterns of Chinese invitation;(2)typical organizational structures of Chinese invitation(3)factors of such typical structures within Chinese politeness principles.The data collected in this research come from the following three corpora: Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU(CCL),BLCU Corpus Center(BCC)and The Modern Chinese Corpus of the National Language Committee(MCCNLC).Six major findings about invitations in Chinese context are as follows.Firstly,in terms of turn-taking patterns,independent pattern,single turn-taking pattern and multiple turn-taking pattern are salient in Chinese invitations,particularly the multiple turn-taking pattern.Secondly,five components including alerters,pre-invitation,core invitation,response expansion and insertion expansion constitute an invitation,among which core invitation can remarkably constitute an invitation alone.Thirdly,this study figures out six types of alerters commonly used when issuing an invitation,including names,official titles,universal addresses,relative addresses,reminders and greetings,functioning to evoke the invitee’s attention,show respect and shorten the social distance between the interlocutors.Fourthly,five typical organizational structures of invitation are summarized into pre-invitation + core invitation,core invitation,alerters + pre-invitation + core invitation,core invitation + insertion expansion and pre-invitation + core invitation + insertion expansion.Fifthly,Chinese prefer adopting stating strategy for describing the event in pre-invitation,inquiringstrategy when issuing an invitation and doubt-explanation strategy to promote the progress of invitation.Finally,it is found that the preference to five prominent organizational structures and three salient strategies adopted in the process of invitation is confined to Deference Maxim,Accordance Maxim and Virtue,Speech and Behavior Maxim within Chinese politeness principles.In a word,this study theoretically enriches the studies of the speech act of invitation in Chinese context.Meanwhile,it is helpful in reducing the pragmatic failures in daily interaction,providing pedagogical implications on how to generate an invitation.