A Pragmatic Study Of Swearing Utterances In A Dream Of Red Mansions

Some scholars and researchers have studied swearing in A Dream of Red Mansions from the following respects: etymology, categorization, lexicology and pragmatic functions. Few researches of swearing as a speech act have been found from the perspective of pragmatics.This thesis will explore the effectuation and interpretation of swearing utterances in A Dream of Red Mansions. Based on the Peking University Corpus, this study sorted out forty-five swearing utterances from this novel and probed into those apparent"ma"meaning-bearing discourses or sentences from a pragmatic perspective. Under the theoretical framework of Austin's speech act theory, this thesis first classified swearing into three speech acts simultaneously: locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act. Then it analyzed each act distinctively and illocutionary act was paid more attention than the other two. The swearer expressed his/her different intentions (illocutionary forces) to the hearer in different contexts, such as insulting, cursing, threatening, criticizing, trick-playing etc..Then, this thesis interpreted swearing utterances elaborately and dynamically with the help of Sperber & Wilson's relevance theory. Since human's cognition is relevance-oriented, people would put emphasis on the phenomenon which seemed to be relevant to them. Every act of ostensive communication communicates the presumption of its own optimal relevance. The hearer's task is to interpret swearing utterances. We could see that swearing is an ostensive-inferential communication, the hearer can receive the optimal relevance with least cognitive effort most of the time.Different from previous studies, this thesis studied swearing utterances dynamically from a new perspective—pragmatics and revealed the process of swearing effectuation and interpretation. This is a significant step to exemplify the utility and explanatory force of pragmatics through concrete data. In addition, the study of swearing utterances in A Dream of Red Mansions might indirectly add understanding to our further appreciation in the magnitude of significance of this great works and offer a new research paradigm to the scholars who want to further study this masterpiece and Chinese swearing.