A Data-based Pragma-Rhetorical Study Of Aposiopesis

“Aposiopesis”,the object of this dissertation,is a half-said but fully meant speech phenomenon,commonly found among the interlocutors in various genres including daily conversations,television programs and literary works and so on.Existing studies have paid some heed to the syntactic features and some functions of aposiopesis,but almost none of them has categorized the main semantic preferences of the omitted content,nor has any study clarified on the basis of sufficient data the speaker"s motivation,the hearer"s uptaking and/or the rhetorical effect achieved through aposiopesis.Therefore,this dissertation intends to dig out the main types of the omitted sayage,the motivations of the speaker,the understanding process of the hearer and the pragma-rhetorical effects of aposiopesis from the perspective of pragma-rhetoric.By exploiting the method of discursive interactional analysis,I analyzed 212 cases from sixteen modern Chinese classic dramas,with adequate turns,to guarantee a relatively objective and systematic description of the omitted part of aposiopesis.I employed SPSS 17.0 in carrying out Chi square distribution test of the types of omitted contents and the speaker"s motivations,followed by a detailed in-depth analysis of the speaker"s motivations and rhetorical effects achieved by aposiopesis within the pragma-rhetoric analysis framework constructed in this dissertation.The study yielded the following major findings:Firstly,as the data demonstrate,the omitted content of aposiopesis is negativity-biased(if ever positive): negative information ranging from negative massage to negative comment,imposition,embarrassing,offending or privacy correlates.Given positivity-charged aposiopeses,what is left unsaid bears an inclination of context-sensitivity.The speaker"s awareness of potential negative interpersonal consequences of explicit expression makes him resort to aposiopesis,colouring aposiopesis a rhetorical strategy.As to the uptaking of aposiopesis,it is found that the hearer is capable of recovering the unsaid part,more or less,by certain available means like formulaic expressions,reflective meanings of the former(said)and the latter(unsaid)part,cognitive framework of certain events,procedural meaning of some words,encyclopedic knowledge,co-text cues and situational context cues.Secondly,the major motivation of employing aposiopesis,as the data indicate,is to covertly transmit what the speaker reckons as sensitive information.More specifically,the speaker utilizes an aposiopesis to downgrade the force of the(negative)speech(pragmatic)acts,according to the data.Speech acts like(negative)statements,requests or criticisms,etc.claim the highest frequencies.The speaker usually resorts to aposiopesis after a well-measured evaluation of the context factors like the relationship between participants,costs and benefits of the utterance content and so on,to achieve his communicative purposes whilst maintaining a pragmatic balance between the relevant pragmatic parameters.Thirdly,considering the pragma-rhetorical effects,the data suggest that most aposiopesis cases do not exert any negative impact on obtaining the speaker-desired“doing-things-effects”,as the hearer sees it.Conversely,the data demonstrate that some aposiopesis cases even boost the hearer"s willingness of acting,owing to such characteristics as deniability and mitigation of aposiopesis.The interpersonal effects of aposiopesis manifest themselves in terms of maintaining interpersonal harmony.It could be manipulated to increase or decrease the interlocutors" social distance at the speaker"s free will,given the function of(im)politeness triggering of aposiopesis.Moreover,poetic effects can be derived from the use of an aposiopesis.A many of examples in our data soak with sadness,sparking a feeling of regret and/or resentment,etc.Poetic effects relate closely to(partial)openness of the interpretation of aposiopesis that induces a series of weak implicatures,hence poetic effects obtainable.Theoretically,this study offers a pragma-rhetorical analytical framework(PRAF).By teasing out the main theories employed in the existing pragma-rhteorical studies and taking the objectives of this study,Speech Act Theory(SAT),(Im)Polteness/Face Theory and Relevance Theory(RT)emerge to be the backbones of PRAF.Under PRAF,the above individual theories of pragmatics are no longer independent theories but inter-dependent theoretical tools,providing separate or integrated explanation as required for a certain utterance concerning its production,understanding and results evaluation,centering on the interpersonal aspects.When taking tasks of rhetoric,namely,pursuing(the best)effects as goals of these three tools,the aforementioned theory tools could work out(including but not limited to)the pragma-rhetorical effects of an utterance from the following standing aspects: “doing-things-effects”,“interpersonal effects” and “poetic effects”.Thus,pragma-rhetoric,as an interdisciplinary paradigm,seems capable of accounting for such rhetorical devices as aposiopesis from different,perhaps more profound and revealing,levels and dimensions.Also,this study may serve to intensify our understanding of aposiopesis.I take aposiopesis throughout the study as a rhetorical strategy,rather than a result of emotion burst or utterance failure(failure to pick up proper words)of discoursive interaction,as envisaged in the existing literature.Taking interpersonal relationship as a kernel thread,this dissertation explores how rhetors make good use of aposiopeses to act or do things,what impacts this acting or doing exerts onto interpersonal relationship,and what pragma-rhetorical effects expected can be realized and achieved.Thus,with aposiopesis data and examples,we try a detailed description and analysis of the omitted content,motivation of the speaker,uptaking of the hearer and the consequent effects of aposiopesis for an intensive,systematic study of aposiopesis.Methodologically,this study adopts a discursive-interactional approach and integrative-pragamtics perspective to gurantee a relatively objective explanation of the data on the basis of adequate turns and contextual evidences,from both the etic and emic perspective.This would have some reference value to the study of pragma-rhetorical phenomena.Practically,the findings of this study could help language users as well as rhetors foster a greater sense of using aposiopesis as a rhetorical strategy to serve various communicative purposes.Whenever a sentence bearing an aposiopesis occurs,people may no longer take it as an error or utterance failure on the part of the speaker but go behind and beyond and grope for the affects underlying the speaker"s choice of aposiopesis.