A Relevance Appraoch To The Illocutionary Force Of Address Forms In Ugly Betty

Address forms, as important elements of human verbal communication, are the first information the speaker conveys to the hearer. Scholars home and abroad have done a great amount of researches on address forms from sociolinguistic, pragmatic, and cross-cultural point of view. However, the present research, which studies how address forms assisting communicators to achieve communicative intention in a more efficient way, is still valuable in application research. Based on the achievements and in view of the limitations of previous studies on address forms, this thesis attempts to study address forms from a new perspective----ostensive-inferential process of relevance theory for the sake of demonstrating the actualization or strengthening of address forms'illocutionary force in speech acts of representatives, directives, expressives, commissives and declarations in the American TV serial Ugly Betty.According to Searle's (1979) classification of speech acts, the author of the thesis firstly collects 721 pieces of dialogues and divides them into five categories: representatives, directives, expressives, commissives and declarations. Then 872 address forms are identified from the 721 dialogues. Data analysis reveals the pragmatic features of the 872 address forms in strengthening illocutionary force in the conversations between family members, lovers, colleagues, acquaintances and strangers respectively. After that, the author takes ostensive-inferential process of Sperber and Wilson's (1986) relevance theory as the analytical approach. This is to clarify that address forms are the speaker's relevant information as optimal relevance in the ostensive process, and they are also the hearer's relevant reaction to contextual effects in the inferential process. By analyzing a number of examples under this research clue, the thesis interprets the cognitive process of address forms'actualization or strengthening illocutionary force of the five types of speech acts. The thesis reaches a conclusion that in ostensive-inferential process, address forms are able to strengthen convincing force of representatives, reinforce intension strengthen of directives, realize emotion power of expressives, intensify aspiration force of commissives and enhance formality power of declarations.As to the significance of the study, three aspects are involved. Firstly, the present study is an attempt of integrated application of pragmatics and relevance theory. This research investigates the common speech act----address forms' illocutionary force from the cognitive inferential aspect, which extends the research scope of pragmatic functions of speech acts and the application scope of relevance theory. Secondly, the study deeply reveals the pragmatic functions of address forms, which highlights the importance of address forms' application in human verbal communication. Thirdly, the research concludes the pragmatic features of address forms in realizing or strengthening illocutionary force in virtue of a large quantity of examples and detailed explanation. It may help communicators use address forms in a more effective way so that their communicative intention can be successfully fulfilled.