The Adaptation Approach To Verbal Comforting In Chinese Contexts

As a way of communication, comforting is widely used in daily communication. Comforting can be manifested in the way of non-speech acts as well as speech acts.This study will focus on comforting as a speech act. Comforting speech is a common language phenomenon, and it is to make someone in the negative emotional state (sad, anger, disappointed, pain or others) feel better by giving comfort to them, which can strengthen relationship.In recent years, the scholars at home and abroad have been seriously researching the speech acts such as complaining, request, compliment, expressing thanks, irony, refusing, apologizing as well as euphemism. However, there still remain many other speech acts to be studied. The study of comforting speech belongs to one of these. So far, although some researches on comforting speech have already been conducted, these ones mainly focus on the perspectives of contrastive analysis, social linguistics or pragmatics. Therefore, this research is devoted to the study of comforting speech within the framework of Verschueren's Adaptation Theory, in order to enrich the research on the understanding of comforting speech from a different angle and shed light on the study of Chinese language.From the perspective of Adaptation Theory, language use is a process of continuous making of linguistic choices. In order to achieve communicative goals communicators have to continuously adapt to relevant contextual elements to make appropriate choices. This study is mainly centered on daily life and TV series for data collection, we hope to find out the reasons why they choose comforting as the strategy and the ways comforting speech adapt to the mental, social and physical worlds of the utterer and the interpreter to realize such a dynamic adaptation process.It is shown that communicators not only choose a variety of linguistic strategies to adapt to different contexts, but also apply contextual factors to reach goals of communication success.