On The Speech Act Of Advising In Rui'an Dialect

This thesis is designed to study the speech act of advising in Rui'an dialect, the dialect of a small city under the Wenzhou city. Based on the naturally occurring data of everyday dialogs, it gives a basic description of the advising act in Rui'an dialect and manages to work out verb moods as well. Then the focus is shifted to speech act expressions employed to realize the speech act and functional profiles of two speech act expressions according to Svenja Adolphs (2008)'s corpus-based approach to studying speech act.This thesis is made up of five parts. Chapter One introduces the research background and states the present research, the latter part including research rationale and research questions. Besides, an overview of the thesis is also made in Chapter One. Chapter Two reviews the previous researches on the speech act of advising according to three different phases. Chapter Three presents the theoretical framework and the data of the research: first it describes the theoretical framework, including the definition on the speech act of advising and the adoption of Svenja Adolphs (2008)'s functional profiles of speech act expressions, and then it states the process of data collection and data transcription in the present thesis. Chapter Four reveals data analysis of the thesis. First, it gives a basic description on the act of advising in Rui'an dialect presented by the data. Then, it reveals the characteristics of the verb moods through which the speech act of advising is realized. Later, it works on some specific speech act expressions which are often used in the suggestion utterances. Finally, it concentrates on the functional profiles of two individual speech act expressions respectively, which includes collocation, functional distribution and contextual distribution. Chapter Five makes conclusions about the main findings of the thesis and describes the strengths and limitations of the present research as well as directions for future research.