A Contrastive Study Of Aposiopesis In English And Chinese

"Aposiopesis" is a common language phenomenon, which means breaking off halfway in a sentence, leaving the rest unsaid out of either the speaker's intentional stop or a sudden stop for such reasons as interruption and emergency. "Tiaotuo" is a common rhetorical device in both ancient and modern Chinese, but there has not been an agree-on view on its definition and classifications. The studies of aposiopesis are mainly in the fields of rhetoric and linguistics home and abroad. The study in rhetoric can be traced back to Aristotle's Rhetoric and mainly on its rhetorical and stylistic functions. There have not been many works or articles specially devoted to aposiopesis study in foreign linguistic literature. In China, the term "Banjiehua" is used in the field of linguistics and the study is mainly on its definition, classifications, semantic functions and pragmatic functions. Based on the previous studies, this thesis makes a contrastive study between English and Chinese from both sides of the speaker and the hearer, trying to analyze the similarities and differences of aposiopesis and explore the underlying cognitive reasons. The study is helpful for further understanding of aposiopesis, comprehensive understanding of discourse analysis, deeper study of language and its relationship with thought and culture. It is also helpful for extension and improvement of cross-cultural communication and contrastive studies of English and Chinese. The ultimate goal is that the similarities of aposiopesis between English and Chinese lie mainly in pragmatic functions, response models and social functions; on the one hand, no matter what language is used, the communicators will follow the relevance principle due to the same human mechanism. On the other hand, differences of aposiopesis between English and Chinese lie mainly in concrete expression forms of these functions due to the cultural variations and the cognitive models.The main research approaches of the present study are contrastive analysis and inductive analysis based on the linguistic data of conversations collected from English and Chinese literary works and daily life. Altogether, this thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 is the introduction, mainly introducing the background, the purpose, the significance, methodology and the outline of the thesis. Chapter 2 briefly reviews the studies of aposiopesis home and abroad in the fields of rhetoric and linguistics. Chapter 3 makes a contrastive analysis of aposiopesis between English and Chinese in the aspects of its pragmatic functions, response models and social functions. Chapter 4 introduces the relevance theory and its explanations for the similarities of aposiopesis between English and Chinese, then cultural variations and cognitive models and their explanations for the differences. Chapter 5 is the conclusion, in which the major findings are presented; besides, research limitations and some suggestions for future study are pointed out as well.