A Study Of "Ba"-construction From The Perspective Of Speech Acts

As a specific sentence pattern,"ba"-congstruction has been a hot topic forresearchers for nearly one hundred years. So far it has formed six systematic researchfields, including study on grammatical sense, syntax, pragmatics, second languageteaching, dialect, diachronic research, etc. With the fast growth of teaching Chinese asa second language, it poses a new subject for us: how to teach "ba"-construction moreefficiently, without only providing syntactical terms to students. We consider theanswer lies on the investigation on how "ba"-construction is actually used in Chinesepeople's everyday life and what the difference is between Chinese people andforeigners when the use "ba"-construction. Therefore, this paper, established in thespeech act theory, which is one of the core theories of pragmatics, studies on thecircumstances of "ba"-construction used by both Chinese and Korean and thecomparison between them. We hope that through our research, we can have a moremature and systematic understanding of "ba"-construction. Meanwhile, we hope thispaper can provide some help to Chinese language teaching.This study is composed by eight chapers.The first chapter is an introduction, which concerns the motivation, theoreticalperspective, the data, the methodology and the composition of the dissertation.The second chapter is literature review, which surveys previous studies of"ba"-construction, pointing the inadequacy and poses the questions we shouldconcern.The third chapter introduces the speech act theory, which includes the theory ofJ.R. Austin, John.Searle and a part of scholars after Searle. Among them we focusmore on the division of the illocutionary act by Searle and make it our theoreticalbasis.The fourth chapter surveys the use of "ba"-construction by Chinese people inconversation. The date is from the script of the thirty-three episode TV series "HunYin Bao Wei Zhan" and one hundred episode TV series "Wo Ai Wo Jia"(one million seven hundred thousand characters approximately). The survey shows that"ba"-construction is usually used to conduct directives, assertives and expressives.Among them, directive "ba"-constructon is the most frequently used type. Meanwhile,the intentions of the "ba"-constructions are usually "strong' and the stronger theintensions, the more use of "ba"-construction. Moreover, we discover that the speakerconduct eight types of illocutionary act, not five suggested by Searle. The other threetypes are assertive/expreesives, make-awaritive and predictives. And, the interrogative"ba"-construction not only perform directives, but also performs expressives,make-awaritives, commissives, etc, and expressives mainly. This differs from Searle'spoint. The last, when the speaker use "ba"-construction to perform expressives,assertive/expressives, make-awaritives and predictives, they sometimes use certaingrammatical means, for example, the use of modal adverbs, the mood adverbs, etc.The fifth chaper discuss the use of "ba"-construction in narration of Chinesepeople. The data is from CCL corpus. The survey shows that in narration the speakeruse "ba"-construction to perform assertives, assertive-expressives, directives,make-awaritives, expressives, predictives and commissives. The first type, assertive"ba"-construction, is the most frequently used, which is different from what is inconversation. Meanwhile, the intensions of the directive "ba"-construction are always"mild", which also differs from the conversational environment. Moreover, innarration, the authors don't show the tendency of using grammatical means. And theinterrogative "ba"-construction only performs two types of illocutionary act:expressives and make-awaritives. As a whole, the use of "ba"-construction is moreflexible and extensive than it was in narration. From the perspective of grammaticalsenses, in conversational environment, the grammatical sense is more "dispositive"than it is in narration.The sixth chapter surveys the use of "ba"-construction of Korean in conversation.The date is from HSK corpus (about seven hundred characters) We discover thatKorean students use "ba"-construction to perform seven types of illocutionary act,including assertives, make-awaritives, directives, assertive-expressives, commissives,predictives and expressives. The former three types of "ba"-construction are the mostfrequently used. When they use the construction to perform directives, their intensionsare always "mild", which is similar to Chinese people in narration and different fromthem in conversation. When they use the construction to perform predictives, theyalmost never use grammatical means like what Chinese people do. And when it comes to the interrogative "ba"-construction use, the Korean students often use it to performdirectives and make-awaritives, which is also different from Chinese people.The seventh chapter surveys the use of "ba"-construction of Korean students innarrition. We designed a piece of questionnaire and interviewed fifteen Koreanstudents. The result shows that in conversation, Korean students often use"ba"-construction to perform five types of illocutionary act: assertives, directives,predictives, make-awaritives and assertive-expressives. The assertive and directive"ba"-construction are the most frequently used types. When they use the constructionto perform directives, their intensions are "mild", which is similar to theirperformance in narration and different from Chinese people in conversationalenvironment. When they perform make-awaritives, predictives and expressives withthe use of the construction, they almost never use grammatical means in the sentence,which forms distinct difference with Chinese people. However, this tendency showssimilarity to their performance in narration. As a whole, whenever in conversation ornarration, the use of "ba"-construction by Korean students shows a steady and singletendency with the comparison of Chinese people, who show a clear tendency ofextensive and diverse.The eighth chapter is the conclusion of the dissertation. First, we review the mainpoints of the study and discuss the division system of Searle. Secondly, we point theshortcomings of the research and the direction we should pay attention to.