An Interpretation Of Speech Acts In A Raisin In The Sun

Linguistics and literature criticism used to be two independent research fields. With the development of linguistic and literary theories and practice, these two disciplines have become closer to each other. Stylistics as an interdisciplinary research field is a result of this development. Professor Shen Dan (2000) summarized the developing process of stylistics: 1) Modern stylistics developed rapidly in the first half of the 20th century and reached its prosperousness in the 1960s and the 1970s; 2) In the 1980s, conversational stylistics began to rise; 3) In the 1990s, social-historical or cultural stylistics developed prosperously. In recent years, there have appeared a number of stylistic schools and scholars of these schools have proposed various perspectives for stylistic analysis. Literary pragmatics or pragmastylistics is one of these schools. Representative scholars of this school include Dutch discourse linguist Van Dijk, American literary linguist Pratt, American linguistic philosopher Searle as well as Chinese pragmastylistician Feng Zongxin.The research of drama, one of the most important literary genres, mainly involves literary criticism. However, compared with fiction and poetry, the study of drama in literary criticism is rather rare. The reason for this phenomenon mainly lies in the fact that the basic element of drama is dialogue, which makes drama less "literary" than the other two literature forms. Using literary theories to study drama is nothing new, but the work done in this field is far from enough. Language in dramatic dialogues is much like that of everyday exchanges, so theories in pragmatics are quite suitable to this task. This kind of work is considered by Feng Zongxin as an interdisciplinary research, which he classified into the field of pragmastylistics, a word coined by him to describe this research field. The appearance of pragmastylistics has broadened the study scope of both pragmatics and stylistics and it has made and will continue to make great contributions to drama criticism and literature research.Speech Act Theory is one of the most important theories in pragmatics. It was...