Communicative Strategies Of Wang Xifeng: From The Perspective Of Linguistic Adaptation Theory

The present study is undertaken to investigate Wang Xifeng's communicative strategies on the basis of Jef Verschueren's Linguistic Adaptation Theory. It tends to dig out the mechanism involved in production of Wang Xifeng's communicative strategies and probe into the rules for her successful communication, that is, whether Wang Xifeng's communicative strategies are the outcome of linguistic choices interadaptable with language user's physical world, social world and mental world.Wang Xifeng, one of the most outstanding characters in the famous Chinese classic fiction—A Dream of Red Mansions, is good at dealing with people with her extraordinary language, which has long captured the interest of scholars. The orientation of language analysis has shifted from literary criticism to research from pragmatic perspective in recent years. Based on naturally occurring data in Wang Xifeng's daily communication, concerning the influence of language, society, culture, psychology and cognition, this paper investigates that, in the process of linguistic communication, in order to achieve her communicative needs, Wang Xifeng adopts different strategies according to the changing of space and time, the power correlated and the social relationships between the speaker and hearer, as well as the psychological elements, so as to continuously adapt to the social-cultural norms and those mental influences like the utterer's motivation, personality, beliefs and intention. It is the crucial point for Wang Xifeng's successful communication. This study indicates that, on the basis of the Linguistic Adaptation Theory, it is a process of intentional choice making for Wang Xifeng's linguistic communicative strategies, so as to obtain or reach her communicative needs. Wang Xifeng can make different choices of strategies through various linguistic structures, but she only chooses to use the one which can realize her communicative goals in accordance with the particular situation. The linguistic structures Wang Xifeng opts for mainly include appropriate terms of address, language style, word, sentence type and conversational topic. The choices of Wang Xifeng's communicative strategies are the result of adaptation to the physical, social and mental world.Through the analysis of Wang Xifeng's communicative strategies from Adaptation Theory, both theoretical and practical significance of this thesis can be explored. Theoretically, it enlarges the vision of linguistic studies and widens the scope of the studies on Chinese which sets up a new angle on Wang Xifeng's study. Practically, it helps us to have a better understanding of Wang Xifeng and enhance our communicative capability which can guide us to communicate under a more harmonic atmosphere. More attention of communication between the Chinese circle and the Western circle is expected.