A Study Of The Speech Act Of Advice In Modern Chinese

The speech act of advice is one of the common directive speech acts.It is a threat to the listener's negative face,but it plays an important role in solving problems and maintaining interpersonal relationships.The research on the speech act of advice in modern Chinese is in the ascendant.However,the discussion on the discourse structure and pragmatic function of advice has not attracted enough attention.Therefore,the present study focuses on discussion of the speech act of advice.It mainly takes the dialogues of characters in six TV dramas,such as The Story of the Editorial Department,as the corpus source,and employs both qualitative and quantitative approaches,as well as descriptive and interpretative ones,to systematically explore the discourse structure and contextual factors of advice.Advice speech acts are classified into direct and indirect ones.From the perspective of the discourse structure,the speech act of the direct advice can be realized through explicit structures,semi-explicit structures,and implicit structures,while indirect advice speech acts can be further classified into conventional indirect and non-conventional indirect speech acts of advice,both of which are realized through the structural forms of declarative and interrogative sentences.There are two types of conventional expressions in the form of the declarative sentence:the first type is the syntactical structure of "discourse markers composed of words or phrases with selective meanings+the rest part of the sentence that signifies advice";the other is the hypothetical conditional sentence.The conventional form by means of interrogative sentences reveals some structural forms,such as A-not-A questions,Yes-No questions,rhetorical questions,and tag questions.It is worth mentioning that the non-conventional indirect advice speech act is mainly realized by means of contextual conditions,and its linguistic realization find its full expression in the use of declarative and interrogative sentences,but a small number of imperative sentences express advice,which,however,have not yet been agreed to become fixed structures and thus,there only exists a loose tie between these expressions or formulas and their linguistic function of advice.Subsequently,it can be seen that the realization of the communicative function of advice speech acts is through not only the above discourse structures,but also contextual conditions in which to use such structures.Contextual conditions are indeed factors that affect the choice of specific discourse structural forms,mainly including social power,social distance,public or private communication situations,nature of topic,urgency of advice,and mental state of speakers,etc.Discourse structural forms and the contextual conditions in which to use them are the two sides of the one coin,and thus can not exist separately.Investigating the use of structural forms in specific contextual conditions is a linguistic issue of the pragmatic distribution of advice speech acts,which is indeed a study of the adaptability between the language forms and contextual factors.The pragmatic distribution of advice speech acts can be divided into the following two aspects.On the one hand,when distinctive social powers exist in communicators,the speech acts of advice mainly occur in public places,and the discourse structures of non-conventional indirect advice speech acts are less used.On the other hand,when the social distance between communicators is closer or tends to be in the middle,speech acts mainly occur in private communication situations,and varied forms of discourse structures may be used.In addition,when the social distance is far away from two communicators,speech acts hardly occur,and mainly in public communication if ever,with implicit structure as the main form,followed by a small number of equivalent choice conventional forms,etc.The communicators express the advice speech act by choosing different discourse structural forms,which is based on contextual factors of social power,social distance,public or private communication situations,nature of topic,urgency of advice,and mental state of speakers and so on,so that they establish and maintain the communicative and interpersonal relationships.Linguistic realizations of the speech acts of advice are varied with different contextual conditions,which is closely related to the variability,negotiation and adaptability of Chinese.Different interlocutors have both similarities and differences in the use of various structural forms,which is the result of different levels of formality,different degree of direction,and politeness scales of structures,conventionalized forms and expressions,as well as the interaction of factors in the material world,social world and psychological world.This dissertation not only discusses the discourse structural forms of Chinese from within,but also fully considers adaptability of discourse structural forms based on the contextual factors,which undoubtedly challenges the traditional understandings of the speech act of advice.All in all,the present study comprehensively investigates language forms of the speech act of advice,explores the contextual factors that affect the choice of the language form performing the function of advice,discusses the dynamics of mutual adaptation and interaction between language form and context,and summarizes the use of language forms by different communicators when implementing the speech act of advice,thus re-conceptualizing to a certain extent the speech act of advice.