The Investigation Of The Persuasive Speech Act In Mencius

Mencius has a far-reaching influence,and there is plenty of room for the study of its persuasive speech act.This article takes the persuasive language of Mencius as the research object,and selects certain texts as a closed corpus from the translation and annotation of Mencius by Yang Bojun,the third edition of Zhonghua Book Company in 2010.We discussed this issue from three aspects: conversational mode,strategic choice,and language thoughts of persuasive speech acts.First,we defined the persuasion,and then distinguished persuasive speech act and suggestive speech act from three aspects: presupposition,speech content,and effect expectation.Through an exhaustive search of the content of 260 chapters,a total of 146 pieces of corpus containing persuasion purposes were collected,accounting for 56% of the entire corpus.Counting the conversational patterns of persuasive speech acts in Mencius,four categories and 22 subcategories are obtained.Among them,"preface + core action language + auxiliary language" and "preface + core action language" are low-frequency conversational patterns."Core action language" and "core action language + auxiliary language" are high-frequency conversational patterns.Among the twenty-two subcategories,there are 2 complete persuasive discourse patterns,and 20 variants of persuasive discourse patterns.The characteristics of Mencius’ s persuasion language behavior embodied in the conversational mode: the persuasion topic is concentrated,the thinking is clear,the focus is clear,and the reasons are sufficiently deep.These characteristics are related to Mencius’ s concentrated promotion of "benevolent governance".Based on the theory of adaptation theory,this paper studied the choices of strategies for persuading speech acts in Mencius.According to the situation of the speakers to listeners,10 persuasion strategies are derived from the mental world,social world,and physical world: considering the persuaded party’s emotions,wishes,presuppositions,concepts,placing value on statuses,relationships,backgrounds,grasping the persuasion opportunities,paying attention to the persuasion occasions and using body language.The characteristics of Mencius’ s persuasion language behavior embodied by strategic choices: wide range of persuasion targets,combination of persuasion reality,emphasis on receptivity and enlightenment.As one of the representatives of Confucianism,Mencius actively propagated and lobbied throughout his life.He focused on the theory of ethics and moral cultivation and the ideal of benevolence,and formed a distinctive idea of persuasion language communication.In terms of language function thinking,Mencius noticed the interpersonal interaction and information transmission function of language.In terms of the relationship between words and meaning,Mencius’ discussion on the relationship between name and reality,the difference between words and meaning,and the expression about simple words with a profound meaning all exerted a profound influence on later generations.In terms of the norms of language communication,Mencius took "virtue,benevolence and righteousness" as the ideological connotation,and observed the norms of "seeking credibility,careful speech and honoring duties" in the process of language communication.In terms of the cognition of linguistic phenomena,Mencius paid attention to the relationship between language and environment,and the auxiliary meaning function of body language in linguistic communication.