The Speech Act Of Advising In Chinese Psychic Consultation TV Programs

Speech Act Theory is one of the dominant theories in pragmatics. It claims that the minimal unit in human communication is not clauses or sentences, but"speech acts", such as advising, requesting, warning etc."Advising"is a typical directive, which is not only universally employed in daily interaction, but also occurs in some formal or institutional settings, such as in teaching or mentoring, in workplace or in TV programs, etc. Understanding the realization patterns and characteristics of"advising", therefore, may help prevent pragmatic failures or mutual misunderstandings, interruptions, even suspensions in daily communication and in cross-cultural communication.Up till now, many researches have been done on the realization patterns of"advising"from a comparative perspective. However, the studies are rarely conducted based on Chinese data exclusively. The present paper is an empirical study grounded on exclusive-Chinese data which was collected from a Chinese TV program---Psychic Consultation. It investigates the realization patterns of"advising"in Chinese on the basis of Searle's indirect speech act theory and his four felicity conditions. Meanwhile, the study explores the politeness strategies utilized by Chinese speakers in the institutional setting, the TV program, within the framework of Brown and Levinson. The study draws the following conclusions: Firstly, all the speech acts of advising are performed indirectly. This fact implies that powered speech participants are more likely to apply strategies in addressing problems in institutional discourses, even if the speech act is in the interest of the addressee. Secondly, modal verbs are more popular than particles as a lexical means for mitigating FTAs in Chinese. Thirdly, positive declarative sentences are the primary tools for advising in the program as a demonstration of legitimate power and expert power. Fourthly, sentences concerning reasons for performing the speech act of advising become the bulk. And this might be attributable to the nature of the program. Fifthly, powerful institutional members often make extensive use of politeness strategies.