The Correspondence Of S-Sets With A-Sets In Speech Acts

Since the speech act theory was initiated by J.L. Austin and improved by J.R. Searle, many linguists write papers or books illustrating their ideas. However, the theory is still abstract and difficult to understand, because most of the illustration of the theory is purely theoretical, and because few people put the theory under the Chinese language environment this makes it far more difficult to understand for Chinese readers. The paper is to explore the theory of speech acts from a more concrete perspective.Even though the theory proposed by Searle is far from being perfect, it is enlightening and serves as the base of the present study. First, a large amount of language material both from English and Chinese has been collected. Second, by employing the comparative and theoretical analysis, the material is analyzed and sorted out. Third, according to the rules proposed by Searle that illocutionary acts must meet the following conditions: proposition content condition, preparatory condition and sincerity condition, some commonly used verbs are analyzed to sub-classify the categories of speech acts. Finally, the collected sentences are classified to match each type of illocutionary acts.Through the matching of both Chinese and English sentences to speech acts, some findings were made. Firstly, there are lots of similarities existing between Chinese and English in expressing the same speech acts. Secondly, cultural difference does play an important role in the difference in speech acts between Chinese and English. Thirdly, performative verbs fit the definition of different types of speech acts better. Fourthly, there do exist laws in deciding the multi-speech acts of the same sentence. In addition, it also puts some of Searle's ideas under doubts.Because of the limitation of the author's experience and the paper's length, much work is yet to be done after. For one thing, the collected sentences haven't covered all the areas of our life. For another, the performatives are not complete, nor are the verbs analyzed one by one. Thus further research will be primarily done to solve the above problems.