A Study On Speech Act Of Promising In Chinese Election Speeches

Since the advent of speech act theory in the 1950s, it has aroused the widest interest in linguistic field. Promise, as one of the most important speech acts, is not only universally employed in daily communication, but also adopted by theorists as examples to illustrate their opinions. Having a deep understanding of the realization pattern of speech act of promising is thus of great importance. Since the context in which a promise is made is of utmost importance for its status as a promise and for its binding effects, it is necessary for us to understand and strengthen our studies on promise making within a specific context.The present study is an empirical study grounded on exclusive Chinese data which was collected from three election meetings held in Heilongjiang Daily Press Group. And it aims to investigate the types, lexical expressions, syntactic patterns and semantic features of speech act of promising in Chinese election speeches within the theoretical framework of speech act theory (SAT).The study draws the following conclusions: first of all, all the speech acts of promising used in the Chinese election speeches are direct speech acts in order to facilitate the hearers'understanding of the main points and show the speaker's determination and ability to fulfill certain task. Secondly, in terms of lexical expressions, the stereotyped speech act verbs for performing speech acts of promising are omitted, instead, only the modal operators are used to achieve the goal. Thirdly, as to syntactic patterns of speech act of promising in Chinese election speeches, the positive declaratives hold the majority, leaving a straightforward impression. And another classification shows that if condition clause also occupies a large percentage to perform speech act of promising, following the pattern of"If P, Q", and constructs a hypothetical mental space which will shorten the distance between interlocutors and produce certain psychological effect on the hearers. At last, in terms of semantic features, sentences concerning the hearers'wish and desire become the bulk, followed by sentences concerning the speaker's ability to perform a future act, which is due to the purpose of the speech, that is to influence the audience and get support from them.The results will, on one hand, add new findings to speech act theory, and on the other hand, provide some guidance to the writing of Chinese election speeches.