A Study On Encouragement And Instruction School Slogans With Adaptation Theory

This is a study on how the Encouragement and Instruction School Slogans (EISS) make language choices to reach the communicative purpose to encourage and instruct the students to grow up. EISS is the majority of the school slogans which is one of the important components of the school culture. EISS play a necessary role in inspiring the students to obtain the academic advance and guiding them to be persons of good character. The existing studies on EISS are scant and almost all of them are from the perspective of education. EISS is a form of linguistic communication and linguistic choice. Therefore, considering the lack of the systematic and linguistic studies of EISS, the study makes an analytic research about it from the pragmatic perspective. The purpose of the study is to improve the quality of EISS and fully carry out its function in the construction of the school culture. The study is an empirical one, mainly based on qualitative analysis of the data, which is in fact the pragmatic interpretation.In the major part of this study, EISS is addressed in three steps, solving three main problems in turn: what kinds of language choices does EISS make; how does EISS reach the communicative goals; what is the adaptation in the producing of EISS? The first problem is dealt with the interpretation of the language choices and the characteristics of EISS, including the word, the structure and the figures employing in EISS. Based on Verschueren's Adaptation Theory, the study proposes a tentative model with higher maneuverability and stronger explanatory power to make an adaptive study on how EISS reach the communicative goals. It is the adaptability that plays a key role for EISS to reach the communicative goals. Subsequently, the study analyzes the adaptation exploited in EISS to the mental world, the social world and the physical world. The adaptation to the three aspects of the context is interadaptatble and the process of adaptation is a dynamic one. The solution of the third question complements the second question. The study reaches its final aim along with the settlement of the third question.