A Pragmatic Study On The Speech Act Of Threatening In Chinese Dialogue

Threatening is a common speech act in people's daily lives. By using some methods of discourse analysis, this thesis intends to make an all-round analysis from the point of view of Pragmatics.The result reveals that: there ate three general sequential patterns of threatening in Chinese context: single threatening sentence, single adjacency pair and multi-adjacency pair. Of the multi-adjacency pair, there ate pre-threatening, core sequence, insertion sequences and response sequences. According to the character of the process, there are four forms: threat—solve—eliminate, threat—question—solve—superaddition, threat—escape—superaddition and threat—refute. And an analysis is focused on the strategies of core, assistance and response.At last, an investigation is carried out into the realization of threatening. The result partially proves that power, social distance etc. play an important role in the choice of threatening strategies.