The Speech Act Realization Of Thanking In A Dream Of Red Mansions

In this thesis, we make a study on the realization of the Chinese speech act of thanking in A Dream of Red Mansions.The thesis begins by defining thanking as: a person's sincere expressions of gratitude for a past or future favor through language. Based on this definition, we collect altogether 173 expressions from A Dream of Red Mansions. Focusing on these expressions, we make a study on: the direct speech act's structural characteristics, its manifestations and situational characteristics, strategies, pragmatic functions, the influence of social parameters on language strategies as well as cultural characteristics and gender characteristics of thanking speech act in A Dream of Red Mansions.Through the study we find: 1) that in direct thanking, the'head acts'words mainly include感激(gan ji),多谢(duo xie),谢(xie),感谢(gan xie),磕头(ke tou),感戴(gan dai),拜谢(bai xie); 2) that there are 7 kinds of manifestations: exclamatory sentence, declarative sentence, rhetorical question sentence, negative sentence, interrogative sentence, hypothetical sentence, imperative sentence; 3) that there are 5 situations where we should express gratitude: when getting help, when getting support, when feeling goodwill, when refusing other's good will, when obtaining consideration or understanding; 4) that we employ 10 strategies in thanking: repaying, showing apology, showing care, praising the hearer, promising, accusing, showing intimate relation, expressing luck, compliment, consoling; and 5) that there are 7 pragmatic functions in our thanking act: expressing gratitude, showing etiquette, strengthening the favorable impression on speaker, adjusting the distance between the speaker and hearer, satisfying the interlocutor's psychology request, a way of euphemistic refusal, a way of request. In addition, we find the presence of some social parameters: power, social distance and ranking of imposition et cetera greatly influence thanking strategies; for example people in high rankings seldom or never express their gratitude directly, and only people in low status or the imposition being strong will people kowtow their thanks. Even if two persons are not in equal status if the social distance between them is close, the strategies being employed will change. We also find in A Dream of Red Mansions, the realization of thanking speech act has its own cultural and gender characteristics; for example some unique thanking speech acts which manifest feudal social phenomenon are disappearing: one is"Amida Buddha!"(阿弥陀佛) which is connected with superstition, the other is"kowtow"(磕头) which indicates unequal social status. Then some other thanking speech acts which demonstrates unequal status such as"shang(赏)"and the bequeath of a person are also disappearing. And through our study we find gender characteristics in thanking: women are subordinate to men and they use certain patterns associated with surprise and politeness more often than men, and employ more exclamations and exaggerations to express their gratitude.The study on the one hand enriches our knowledge about the speech act of thanking from the Chinese language and cultural angles, and on the other hand provides us more guidance in the using of it in our daily life.Of course, this study contains some shortcomings; for instance we do not look into the structural characteristics of indirect thanking, and when judging the social status, our standard still lacks accurateness. In the future we may extend the study to cover more works written in the middle and late Qing Dynasty, and compare the differences in the realization of thanking in the Qing Dynasty and modern society.