Study On Directives In A Dream Of Red Mansions

Studies on A Dream of Red Mansions have had a long history. The work has influenced Chinese culture and even world culture. The findings range in a variety of aspects from history, folkway, culture, literature to ethics. Most current researches employ the approaches of diction and historical exploration and many achievements have been obtained in the research fields of, for instance, character-shaping and lost-exploring. However, the cultural connotation analysis of its language is still far from adequate. A new discipline---pragmatics explores the language usage in a way closely related to its cultural connotation. Hence, pragmatic theory is applied into the research of A Dream of Red Mansions. By exploring the directives in A Dream of Red Mansions and sampling various examples of directives, the author intends to analyze politeness conciousness and strategies to prove the feasibility of Politeness Theory in Chinese pragmatics and compare the commonly used politeness strategies in detail. Based on the discussion of Chinese politeness strategies as embodied in the work, the thesis comments on the relationship between indirectness and politeness and evaluates polite speech acts on a broad perspective. The dissertation obtains the following conclusions:1) Most of the strategies for directives in English are available -to Chinese. The most frequently used ones are mood derivables for Chinese communicators. Self-denigration, honorifics and supportive moves are the commonly used mitigation devices. Not only do these devices play a significant role in maintaining face, but also they contribute to the implementation of requests.2) It is urgent that we should, based on Speech Act Theory, dig into directives and master their essence in a broad perspective of pragmatic activities.3)Western Politeness Theory, which argues that for directives, politeness expressions originate from indirectness, works limitedly in Chinese. Linguistic means such as address terms and repetition are more essential for expressing politeness and understanding the phenomenon in Chinese. Indirectness and politeness are not equivalent entities.People need to reconsider the construction of Politeness Theory in the cross-cultural communication. It is expected to provide more reasonable explanation for speech acts under the background of different cultures. Pragmatic theories should hence be a better guide to the enactment of linguistic reality.