A Pragmatic Analysis Of Redundancy In Chinese Weather Forecast Discourse

Weather forecast has become an indispensable part of our life, and the weather forecast at approximately 19:30 in CCTV-1 every day has become the most popular program. Because it is highly informative, few linguists pay attention to its redundancy, which offers a novel perspective to study weather forecast discourse.Based on previous studies on redundancy and the goal of weather program, redundancy in Chinese weathercast discourse is defined as any information, other than the core information in weather forecast, deliberately employed by weathercasters, as a communicative strategy, to realize the communicative goal. Redundancy in Chinese weathercast discourse, with Adaptation Theory as its theoretical framework, is categorized into linguistic redundancy and contextual redundancy according to its adaptation to structure and context. Linguistic redundancy is further classified into lexical repetition, synonyms and near-synonyms, co-reference and discourse markers, while contextual redundancy is subdivided into greetings, apology, reminding, sensory temperature, weather review, meteorological knowledge, verbal fillers and audio-visual redundancy.In linguistic redundancy, the repetition of Beijing's weathercast constitutes the unique pragmatic function of repetition in weather forecast redundancy. As Beijing's weather is always forecast both at the very beginning of city weather forecast and at the end of it, Beijing's weathercast serve as a marker of the starting of city weather forecast and the finishing of the whole weather program for the time being. Discourse markers mainly function to link two discourse segments without contributing propositional meaning to either of them, but discourse markers'absence often leads to a vacuum in hearers'lexical clue.The contextual redundancy in Chinese weathercast discourse is characterized by chiefly four pragmatic functions; namely, function of maintaining social relationships; of protecting people's lives and property or improving people's living standard; of helping to understand weather and weather forecast; and of gaining time for forecasters to organize their language.Language's adaptability to the social world is very pervasive. Among the utmost social factors which linguistic choices are interadaptable with are communicative norms. To maintain good social relationships, communicative norms including greeting, apology, and explanation etc. must be observed in communication. Weathercasters mainly choose to greet audience at the beginning of the program, apologize for inaccurate forecast and explain why disparity between sensory weather and forecast weather arises to sustain good relationship with the audience.Mental world plays a significant role in triggering language choices and coloring interaction. Aspects of mental world may be activated in language use are extensive, including personality, emotions, beliefs, desires or wishes, motivations or intentions. In weather forecast, what affects the choices of language most is the motivation or intention of the weathermen. As their primary concern is to protect people's lives and property in the coming of bad weather via precautions and improving people's living standard in normal days via offering weather information for people to arrange their life, they choose to make explicit the message conveyed in core weather information and remind people to take precautions.To make the forecast fully understood by audience is another factor affecting weathermen's language choice, because audience may have never heard of some terms in the forecast. To adapt to this context, they add related meteorological knowledge to the forecast when it is necessary.Verbal fillers like"呃,啊,呵,呢"in Chinese weather forecast mainly function to provide time for the speaker to arrange the talk, or for the hearer to comprehend the message."呢"also serves to emphasize the point coming directly before it. Gender also affects the choice of verbal fillers. According to the forecast from June 15th to July 10th, it is found that Yang Dan's frequency of using verbal fillers is about 7.02 times more than that used by Song Yingjie, and even the lower frequency of them applied by female, Wang Lanyi, is still 2.29 times to that by Feng Shu, who used them more often than Song Yingjie did. Generally speaking, the female forecasters employed substantially more verbal fillers in their language both in times of appearance and numbers of words than their male counterparts.However, the use of certain redundancy in Chinese weathercast discourse is in question. For example, the necessity of announcing the information issuing department in such a short program is under controversy, as the information is already displayed on the screen. Linguistic choice-making are often institutionally sanctioned in social setting: only a judge has the right to pass a sentence, and only a weatherman representing China's Meteorological Administration is entitled to forecast weather in CCTV channel-1, so weathermen are ratified utterers, and their forecast is from authorative institutions. Therefore, due to the adaptation to the social world, such redundancy seems to be unnecessary.