Study On Functions Of British English Intonation From The Perspective Of Pragmatics

Pragmatics is a newly established discipline emerging in the 70s last century, which studies specific discourse in specific context, or how the language is used and interpreted in different contexts. It involves the study of speaker meaning, contextual meaning, how more is communicated than is said, and the expression of relative distance. Intonation study deals with pitch changes and other suprasegmental features like stress and pause phnomena, which are all features of language in use. It is an important way of communication and plays a significant role in interpreting and understanding utterances, which may find its crucial influences in the attitudinal, contextual, accentual, informational, and discoursal respects. Since both of the two disciplines share a common target of language use, their combined study will prove feasible and fruitful.This paper here is intended to recount the important roles English intonation plays in verbal communications from the perspective of pragmatics. Some typical representative pragmatic theories will be picked out to be illustrations. Meanwhile, significant roles of intonational study in pragmatics are also expressed.The present paper, apart from introduction and conclusion, is divided into 4 chapters and organized in the following way.Introduction part briefly tells the theme of the paper and the starting point of the study. The necessity and feasibility of study on functions of BritishEnglish intonation from the perspective of pragmatics are pointed out.Chapter 1 provides definitions of pragmatics and intonation. It also gives an account of major approaches adopted in the study of British English intonation and basic unit of English intonation analysis.Chapter 2 has a brief introduction of some representative studies on functions of British English intonation in the past from varied aspects of grammar & syntax, suprasegmental meaning, emotions & attitudes, discourse analysis and pragmatics.Chapter 3 provides a synthetical analysis about pragmatic theory sources for the study of English intonational functions, which includes indirectness of language theory, speech act theory, relevance theory, conversational implicature theory, and context theory. Joints of studies in these two fields are pointed out and mutual explanatory force is expounded.Chapter 4 pragmatically illustrates the attitudinal function, contextual function, accentual function, informational function and discoursal function of English intonation. Plenty of examples are employed to be explanations.Conclusion sums up the whole thesis and reasserts the necessity and feasibility of the combined study of pragmatics and English intonational functions.