A Study On The Directive Speech Acts In Drama Thunderstorm From The Perspective Of Speech Act Metonymy

This thesis aims to make an exploration on the speech act of directives in the famous Chinese drama Thunderstorm by employing Panther and Thornburg's speech act metonymy theory and the relevant pragmatic parameters.As a distinctive linguistic phenomenon, speech acts have always been the focus of linguistic masters. However, more and more scholars find that the traditional pragmatic study has some shortcomings in that it cannot offer a systematic and satisfactory description of the communicators' cognitive processing.Panther and Thornburg for the first time make a research on the metonymic system of speech acts from a cognitive perspective and put forward the speech act metonymy theory in 1997. The present study is launched based on their theory. According to them, an action scenario has three parts:the BEFORE, the CORE/RESULT and the AFTER. In a metonymic operation, each part can stand for the whole scenario, so the speakers can perform a speech act by just mentioning an attribute of the scenario.After the exploration of the directive speech act metonymies in the drama, the present study leads to the following findings:First, the structure CORE is the most frequently adopted structure in the directive speech acts, with the structure BEFORE ranking at the second place. The structure CORE can express one's idea directly while the structure BEFORE indicates the motivation or precondition of a certain action, therefore both of them are widely used.Second, as for the adoption of action scenario structures, people with different personalities and social status tend to make different selections.Third, in order to achieve a certain purpose, people tend to use various structures in turn to activate the whole scenario. These structure transitions are influenced by the person's cognitive background, the real context and other pragmatic parameters.Fourth, the speech act structures have different distributions and various functions in the subtypes of directives. For example, the structure BEFORE is often used in requests, while the structure CORE is mostly employed by orders.Through the study, the thesis analyzes and explains the cognitive and pragmatic rationale of people's adoption of the speech act metonymy, as well as the effect of these metonymies, aiming to better illustrate the effectiveness of the cognitive metonymic approach to the interpretation of speech acts. Drama Thunderstorm has always been the master piece in Chinese history, so it is hopeful that this study may shed some light on the understanding of this drama and may provide a new perspective and a new method to the study of it.