Pragmatic Functions Of Echoic Utterance And Its Application In College English Listening And Speaking Teaching

Originally speaking, echo as a physical phenomenon appears everywhere in daily life. Linguists name this phenomenon that repeats as a whole or part of what has been said by the prior speaker as echoic utterance. Echoic utterance is one of the most interesting and active language phenomena during verbal communication, and plays various pragmatic functions. Echoic utterance belongs to a metalanguage, by citing other's utterance into one's own utterance, in order to show some attitude towards the utterance.In the middle of last century, Lv Shuxiang, the most famous linguist in our country, has ever mentioned "fu wen" that is "echo question", the most important subtype of echoic utterance in his Zhong Guo Wen Fa Yao Lue. However, there is no enough systematic study towards echoic utterance till now. As a common and very interesting language phenomenon in everyday verbal communication, echoic utterance has not gained enough attention as it should be. Quirk et al. study echoic utterance comparatively, systematically and generally in their A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (1985).In On Echoic Utterances in Verbal Communication (2001), Wen Xu and Chen Zhi'an generally summarize the thoughts of Quirk et al. They define echoic utterances as "utterances which repeat as a whole or in part what has been said by the previous speaker." According to verbal function, they claim that echoic utterances can be divided into echo question and echo exclamation, and the former subtype is used much more frequently during verbal communication. Echo question can be further divided into recapitulatory echo question and explicatory echo question. Recapitulatory echo question is only the question that repeats the prior sentence the speaker has just said partially or wholly, in order to confirm what he or she has heard. Explicatory echo question mainly asks for the clarification instead of the repetition. Although echo exclamation also repeats part or all of a prior utterance, in contrast to echo question, which uses a rising tone, the echo exclamation often uses a rise-fall tone.This thesis first reviews the relative study about echoic utterance both domestically and abroad, during which this thesis has found that many learners study echoic utterance from various views under different theoretical frames. Meanwhile, the name, the definition, the classification and the pragmatic function of echoic utterance all have changed a lot.However, during reviewing, it is also found that there is still lack of united and systematic study towards echoic utterance. Especially with the popularity of cognitive pragmatics, it is not enough to define echoic utterance only verbally. Therefore, this thesis creatively divides echoic utterance into explicit echoic utterance and implicit echoic utterance. The former is the traditional echoic utterance; and the latter means the speaker echoes what has been said psychologically instead of repeating any of the previous utterance in order to show certain attitude towards the utterance according to the context. Thus, this thesis redefines echoic utterance as "utterance which verbally or psychologically, repeats as a whole or in part what has been said by the former speaker to express certain attitude towards the prior utterance." Meanwhile, this thesis also shows the differences between echoic utterance and some non-echoic utterances such as Recapitulation, Responsion and Salutation. Furthermore, this thesis has paid attention to echo declarative, a long-time neglected important subtype of echoic utterance which the speaker echoes the previous utterance with a declarative to express some pragmatic function, often used in conversations like interview, talk show, interrogation, etc. Thus, this thesis divides echoic utterance into explicit and implicit echoic utterance, and the former can be further divided into echo question, echo exclamation and echo declarative. And implicit echoic utterance includes some wh-words such as "what", "who", "where", etc. and some high frequently used expressions such as "really", "excuse me", "pardon", and so on. This thesis vividly considers the features of echoic utterance should be contextual, meta-representative, implicit, informal and stress-movable. Then, combined with a lot of examples, this thesis summarizes the pragmatic functions of echoic utterance as Astonishment, Confusion, Irony, Confirmation, Curiosity and Interest, Doubt, Dissatisfaction, Cohering and Thinking, Emphasis and Consent, and Feedback.With the development of science and linguistics, it is found that more and more studies are combined with language application instead of only studying theory. Therefore, this thesis combines theoretical research with applied English-language, and detailed analyzes echoic utterance under the relevance-theoretic framework. Nowadays, English is being used more and more wildly, especially in college, almost every college student has to participate in one of or some of the English language examinations, mainly including College English Test (CET) 4, CET 6, Test for English Majors (TEM) 4, and TEM 8. Therefore, this thesis collects the scripts of the listening conversations of the latest 10 examinations of the four tests respectively, totally 40. After analyzing the whole corpus, this thesis totally sums up 70 echoic utterances, and almost all the examples mentioned in this thesis are excerpted from them. Based on the knowledge of echoic utterance, this thesis analyzes the type and pragmatic function of the 70 man-made echoic utterances one by one, and analyzes the frequency and the distribution of the examples by using SPSS.According to the analysis of the corpus, it has been found that echoic utterances are highly frequently used in every kind of test, and each test contains all types and pragmatic functions of echoic utterance. Echoic utterance may often produce some implications, which are hard for native speakers to understand correctly. What is more, as a second language, it will be more difficult for second language learners to handle and understand the meanings, rather than the implications. Thus, the analysis and study of this corpus could not only make English learners work out various examinations better, but meanwhile make the learners know the way how the Anglophones communicate better with each other under the similar environment to strength their sense of using echoic utterance, and understand better the implications. And thus, both the fluency and the efficiency of verbal communication can be improved. This could offer some new teaching thoughts and directions to the English teachers, who should apply echoic utterance into language teaching to let both language teachers and learners notice how to use this common yet important language phenomenon.