Analysis On The Text Of "It Is Said That..."

By using discourse research, conversation analysis and the Three-Level Theory(syntactics, semantics and pragmatics), this paper studies the structure, semantic features and pragmatic functions of" It is said that..." as a speech unit in context. (For convenience sake, sentence, sentence groups and paragraphs introduced by "It is said that..." are all regarded as the speech unit of "It is said that...". The structure of this unit in discourse is "pre-item + "It is said that..." + post-item.) The inner reasons that lead to the different functions of this unit in different discourses have been explored in this paper. Furthermore, a comparison between the speech units of "It is said that..." and "It is heard that..."is also given.. This paper consists of six chapters:Part one is the introduction. By probing into the former scholars' research on "It is said that...", and some existing problems are pointed out. The source corpus, the purpose of the study, the research methods, and the importance of this study are presented in this part.Part two is about the syntactic features of the speech unit of "It is said that...". It focuses on the position of this unit in speech unit, and the structure and the cohesive devices of this speech unit. There are two connective forms in the speech unit of "It is said that...", parallelism structure and imparallelism structure. Parallelism structure can be subdivided into the following: simple sentence parallelism, complex sentence parallelism and phase parallelism. While imparallelism includes the imparallelism of sentence structure and phase.Part three dwells on the semantic relations of the speech unit, "It is said that...". The semantic relation refers to the relations between the pre-item and post-items in this speech unit. Concretely speaking, there are three kinds of relations: semantic relations in time, semantic relations in logic and other semantic relations. Semantic relations in time includes past tense, progressive tense and future tense. Semantic relations in logic includes sequential connection, backward sequential connection and transferred connection. Other semantic relations include the expression of subjective attitudes and feelings. Because semantic relations depend on the contents of the sentences, so they can be divided into different categories according to the different contents expressed.Part four focuses on the pragmatic functions of the speech unit "It is said that ...". It conveys different functions in different discourses such as the function of stressing, discourse marker, turn-taking in conversation, semantic presupposition and expressing in an euphemized way.Part five discusses the inner reasons of the functions of the speech "It is said that ...". The inner reasons for its different discourse functions are presented as follow: the meaning of this unit, the inherent law of objective world, subjective attitudes of the narrators, discourse structure, and contextual semantic relation and etc.Part six is the comparison between the speech units of "It is said that..." and "It is heard that...". Speech unit of "It is heard that..." includes the sentences, sentence groups and paragraphs that lead by this unit. Though they are quite same in meaning, there are great differences between the composition of pre-itemsand post-items.