A Study Of Understatement As A Pragmatic Strategy From An Adaptation-Based Perspective

Understatement is a frequently used pragmatic strategy in daily communication. It employs the mild and restrained words to replace the direct and unpleasant words in order to attenuate the strength of utterance, mitigate the communicational atmosphere, cover people's embarrassment, evoke more positive feelings, maximize the emotional acceptability of the propositional content, increase the sense of humor and to show the politeness of the speaker. It is a quite efficient linguistic strategy.Scholars home and abroad have done fruitful researches on understatement from the perspective of rhetoric, semantics, sociology, psychology and pragmatics. But all the previous researches on understatement are far from convincing since most of the studies only focus on the interpretation of understatement rather than its production mechanism; some pay much attention to the linguistic forms of understatement but ignore the external factors (culture, society, psychology...) influencing and leading to the production of this unique linguistic phenomenon; and more importantly, nearly all the previous studies treat the production process of understatement as a static state, which is opposed to the real situation of understating process.Based on the previous researches, this thesis will draw support from Verschueren's Adaptation Theory to make a new and comprehensive study on understatement from a social, cultural and cognitive perspective. The four tasks of Adaptation Theory (contextual correlates of adaptability, structural objects of adaptability, dynamics of adaptability, and salience of adaptation process) construct the theoretical foundation of this thesis. Under the guidance of this theoretical framework, this thesis will discuss the adaptation of understatement to different communicational contexts, different expression forms of understatement, the dynamics of understating process and people's mental work while understating. Since the four tasks of Adaptation Theory are integrated, these different focus points are integrated too, studying how people adapt to all kinds of contexts (mental, social and physical world) and make appropriate linguistic choices in a dynamic process consciously to understate and then to realize their communicational purpose, achieve a successful communication and to maintain a harmonious human relationship. The focus of this thesis will not be only limited to the analysis of understating process, but concerns itself with how to help people become competent language users, so the cultivation of people's understating ability will also be discussed in this research, aiming at helping people build a happy family and an amicable community, hence, a harmonious society.The present study will enrich the research on understatement in terms of the study of the production mechanism of understatement and the discussion of the cultivation of understating ability. It can help people acquire this language strategy more easily and correctly, which is beneficial to a successful communication. Additionally, through the study on understatement, it is found that the theoretical foundation applied in this thesis could be employed to explain other linguistic phenomena so as to help people employ all kinds of language strategies appropriately and communicate smoothly.Limitations inevitably exist in this study, for example, the ignorance to the description of interpreter's reaction, the lack of concentration on the specific form of discourse, and the tendency to subjectivity. In this case, more time, effort and further improvement is still necessary for the study of understatement in order to help people acquire and apply this language strategy efficiently, to ensure a successful communication and to set up a harmonious society.