Speech Act Theory, As The Domain Directive Behavior Analysis

In the 1950 s, with the development of Speech Act Theory, there were some new views about illocutionary logic from the perspective of Speech Act Theory. Consequently, based on Searle's speech act theory, the author explores the the characterization of directives of Chinese language, especially by means of logic ananlysis to the directives. The present thesis consists of three parts as follows:The first part summarizes the basic theories about the speech act and the directives. The author expounds the classification of Searle's speech act and make an overall review of the studies done on the directives. The second part discusses the linguistic devices of Chinese which can be used to perform directives. In this part, the author discusses difinition of the directives and some relevent problems, such as direct directives and indirect directives and how to distinguish them. The third part, which is the central part of theoverall thesis, makes the logic analysis of directives mainly from the logic perspective. Then it examines the logic premise to study directives, that is, the presupposition of directives. Also, the logical truth conditions of directives are defined. Finally, the reasoning rules of directives are analyzed and two logic inference systems about minor category of directives are offered. Several pragmatic factors which could affect the premise, conclusion, and validity of the inference are also considered. These factors also lay the foundation for deeper logic analysises of directives. Further application of logical methods of directives to the Chinese language will constitute one of our future research focuses.