A Study Of Discourse Control Acts And The Perlocutionnary Effects

The theory of discourse control acts is relatively new, which is first put up by Thomas in 1990. These discoursal control acts (DCAs) are a group of conversational strategies that offer insights into the way in which a dominant speaker may deliberately limit the discoursal options of a subordinate interlocutor. Discourse control acts, as Thomas explains, are three separate but related acts: discoursal indicators, metadiscoursal comments and interactional controllers (Thomas, 1990: 136). The principal function of discoursal indicators is to define the purposes and the boundaries of discourse. By means of metadiscoursal comments, the dominant participant is able to keep the subordinate participant within pre-defined limits and interactional controllers is used to elicit a particular form of feedback from the subordinate.The thesis selects forty confrontational interactions as the study objects on the basis of Thomas's discourse control acts. The language materials chosen from IELTS are true and natural enough for the tentative study. And the author ventures to divide the materials into four types: business talks, radio interviews, professor-student conversations and job interviews. The thesis focuses on the previous studies on speech acts and then points out that there are still jobs to do thereby introduce discourse control acts in chapter 1. Then the thesis emphasizes the functions of the discourse control acts in chapter 2.The thesis examines the discourse control features from both how the dominant participants use the discourse control acts to restrain the discoursal options of the subordinate and the features displayed by the subordinate's frequent use of politeness and showing stallings and hesitations in answering the questions from the dominant in chapter 3. In doing so, the thesis extends the application of the theory of discourse control acts that considers the discourse control features mainly from the way that how the dominant limit the linguistic choices of the subordinate.After analysis of the discourse control features in chapter 3, the thesis goes on...