Semantic Prosodies And The Role Of Promisees In The Speech Act Of Commissives

Inspired by linguists'such as Sinclair's enlightening work on semantic prosodies (1996), this research aims at evaluating Searle's theories regarding the speech act of commissives in the main aspects of illocutionary point and perlocutionary force.After a critical review of the previous studies concerning the speech act of commissives, as well as the rise and influence of corpus linguistics in the field of linguistic research, this thesis presents a corpus-based scheme of the study. It goes on to adopt the four categories of"Neutral Prosody, Positive Prosody, Negative Prosody, and Mixed Prosody"and four sub-categories of prosodic meanings in order to classify and analyze the semantic prosodies revealed by the concordances of major commissive verbs, and thus to judge the behaviors of the major commissive verbs and the characteristics of the speech act of commissives.The five major English commissive words of promise, guarantee, pledge, assure, and swear, and the five major Chinese commissive words of承诺,答应,保证,发誓, and许诺are chosen to be studied on the basis of the English corpus of BNC (British National Corpus) and the Chinese corpus of CCL online (corpus established by Center for Chinese Linguistics of PKU). For each commissive verb, about 100 concordances have been extracted from the corpus and grouped within the categorizing framework. And the concordances in the most important semantic prosody categories for the verb have been analyzed in detail from the perspectives of collocational profile, colligational and discourse patterns, semantic preference and semantic prosody. And it is found that, the commissive verbs often show clear semantic prosodies which reveal both the promisors'and the promisees'attitude toward and comments on the events. Comparisons of the English and the Chinese commissive verbs have also been made based on the findings. These findings suggest that the role of promisees exists and cannot be ignored in the speech act of commissives, and that Searle's relevant claims which ignore the role of promisees have to be improved and revised.