On Directives And Chinese Imperatives

Under the guidance of speech acts theory, this dissertation gives a full and systematic discussion of Chinese directives and imperatives. Like English directives, Chinese directives can be divided into two types: direct directives and indirect directives. And in Chinese, there're many different devices can be used to perform these two types of directives. Different devices have different degree of manipulative strength and politeness which will influence the effect of the performed directives. And the effect is also influnced by the power, the status of the speaker and the hearer and some social and cultural factors.Generally speaking, the sex, age and the education conditions of the speaker have influences on the choose of devices to perform directives. As an important device to performe directives, imperatives are also studied in this paper. Relevent syntactic and semantic problems are disscussed. In the end, two types of styles(the introductions of products and legal documents) in which directives can be performed are also discussed.The dissertation consists of ten chapters:The first chapter is a brief introduction to the significance of this study, its scope, guidelines and methodology.The second chapter introduces the speech act theory and makes an overall review of the studies done on the dirctives.The third chapter discusses definition of the directives and some relevent problems,such as time and irrealis modality, directives and questions, directives and negation, directives and modality, etc. And directives can also be divided into emotional directives and performative directives.The fourth chapter discusses the differnce of direct directives and indirect directives and how to divide them. It also briefly describes the devices in Chinese which can be used to perform them. The following relevent problems are discussed too: direct and indirect directives and the speaker(including politeness and the speaker's self attitude), direct and indirect dirctives and the hearer, direct and indirect dirctives and conventions and inference, the effect of direct and indirect directives.The fifth chapter summarized the linguistic devices in Chinese which can be used to perform direct and indirect directives. Direct directives can be performed with illocutionary sentences with performative verbs. Indirect directives can be performed with following sentences:these stating or asking the hearer's capability or necessity of...