| The study of speech acts has been a central theme of pragmatic research for over a decade. Unfortunately, Chinese pragmatic research has not kept pace. To reach a more in-depth understanding of how interrogatives are used by Chinese native speakers and how we should define and categorize Chinese question types, this data-based study, using the speech act as the basic unit of an utterance, examines the different illocutions Chinese speakers express when posing a question.; Through a review of former literature, it is argued herein that the traditional methods of classifying and analyzing interrogatives by syntactic and semantic categories do not fully justify the way speakers of Mandarin use interrogatives. This study includes pragmatic categories in the classification of interrogatives in order to answer such questions as: Which question forms are being used in interrogatives? Which illocutions are being expressed through different question types? Which question types do Chinese speakers prefer when communicating certain speech acts, such as requests, commands, invitations, etc.? How is the choice of question forms influenced by structure, politeness, directness, and status?; The findings from this pragmatic study have implications for the fields of Chinese linguistics, interlanguage pragmatics and Chinese as a foreign language. The results reveal the need for more emphasis and discussion in these fields on the use of sentence-final particles with questions, on rhetorical questions, which occur almost half of all questions, and on intonation questions, which make up over one-fifth of all interrogative occurrences in our data. Furthermore, certain question types are found linked with politeness, which may be one reason why many questions on the surface are requesting information or confirmation, but underlying are expressing other illocutions, such as rebuking or complaining. These findings support the view that analysts need to go beyond a single utterance when examining the speech act a speaker is performing. In our analysis, we discover a speech act "process" to exist in that speakers often use intermediate (or "immediate") speech acts as stepping stones to higher (or "underlying") goals. |
