On The Probing Speech Act In English Talk Shows

Probing, as a type of speech act, can be vividly described as using tactful and strategic linguistic means to unlock the sealed lips and unveil the secrets and hidden facts. Through the ages, this special type of speech act has long been misleadingly equated with questioning, thus missing countless opportunities to arrest the attention of linguistic circle. Taking the discrimination between probing and questioning as the first task, the present thesis is devoted to the exploration into the special features of the probing speech act on almost all micro-linguistic levels, aiming at identifying an independent status for probing in the speech acts family.A combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches has been applied in this research to analyze the data transcribed from the videos downloaded from the Internet. The data are drawn from ten episodes of a household American TV talk show program Oprah Show, which, as a type of semi-institutional discourse, is packed with probing acts and authentic language. This research aims to address three questions: How can the speech act of probing be scientifically defined? How can the speech act of probing be realized in language forms? How can the speech act of probing be performed tactfully and strategically by language?Austin's and Searle's Theories on Speech Acts, together with Brown & Levinson's Theory on Politeness, constitute the theoretical framework of the present study. Searle's four felicity conditions for performing a speech act are taken as the criteria for defining the speech act of probing and distinguishing such an act from questioning and other types of speech acts. The speech act of probing is attempted to get the hearer to release privacy or withheld information for the speaker's or a third party's good, which might involve the hearer into a disadvantageous situation. It is directed at the change of the hearer's internal world from reluctance to willingness to tell as is expected by the speaker.Some general findings have been drawn from the present study. First, high pitch, short duration and frequent pause are phonetic features of the probing act. Second, lexicon is not the primary means to diminish the force of probing, since traditional polite terms or expressions attached to directives such as modal verbs and mitigative exclamations are rarely adopted; on the contrary, strong and brutal terms are frequently used. Third, the syntactic realization of probing is manifold. Eight sentence patterns have been detected: besides interrogatives, declaratives and imperatives are also the frequently-adopted alternative sentence patterns. Fourth, cohensive device of repetition is frequently employed in the spoken discourse performing the probing act. Mechanical repetition or paraphrasing is used to highlight the speaker's insistence on eliciting the expected information. Fifth, semantic categorization of the probing sentences according to motifs results in three groups, sentences concerning the speaker, the hearer and the act. Different from the speech acts of suggesting and requesting, probing act is mainly performed by means of sentences concerning the speaker and the act rather than sentences concerning the hearer. Sixth, the probing act is an indirect speech act which is realized through performing a second illocutionary act such as interrogative, assertive, directive. Last, the performance of probing act has a high demand on politeness. The hearer's positive face (i.e. the desire to be respected and approved of) should become the main concern of the speaker when performing a probing act.