A Study On The Pragmatic Functions Of Beliefs In Modern Chinese

In modern Chinese, sentences that include belief predicates reflect people’s subjective emotional attitudes to a certain degree, but this phenomenon has not drawn enough attention, few scholars have done exclusive and deep research on the features and pragmatic functions of such sentences. Based on the fact of modern Chinese and combined with propositional attitude theory as well as speech act theory, this paper tends to make a detailed analysis on predicate sentences from three dimensions including the concepts of functional linguistics, interpersonal communication and textual function.Firstly,analyzes the features of belief predicate sentences. Starting from the features of propositional attitude sentences, this paper defines belief predicates and belief predicate sentences, and determines the object of this study. Then, features of the three components of belief predicate sentences are respectively analyzed in detail, including the features of the image of the attitude subject, subordinate proposition and belief predicates.Secondly,analyses the belief predicate sentence in aspect of negation.Combined with relevant logic methods, this paper analyzes the belief predicate sentences in the negative attitude of ownership and negation transfer phenomenon, and also summarizes the common negative forms.Thirdly, analyzes the subjective meaning of belief predicate sentences from aspects of propositional attitude and indirect speech act through sorting out the corpus. The propositional attitude embodied by belief predicate sentences can be classified into three types, which are recognition, evaluation and emotion. And also makes a comparison of the differences between belief predicate sentences and view predicate in particular. With reference to the indirect speech act theory put forward by J.R. Searle, this paper discusses the four indirect speech acts in belief predicate sentences.Finally,investigates the textual function of belief predicate sentences from aspects of information function, cohesion and structural function.Taking relevant theories of functional linguistics as the guidance and the collation and analysis of modern Chinese corpus as the basis, this paper conducts a comprehensive and detailed investigation of the pragmatic functions of belief predicate sentences in modern Chinese. The paper finds that modern Chinese belief predicate sentence has strong subjectivity.The research results will help people recognize modern Chinese sentences from a quite new point of view and it is also expected to provide some beneficial reference for modern Chinese teaching.