Desperate Housewives: The Interpretation Of Directives From The Perspective Of Speech Act Metonymy

This thesis intends to offer a cognitive interpretation of the directive speech actsin an American soap opera Desperate Housewives under the guidance of Panther andThornburg’s speech act metonymy theory and the relevant pragmatic parameters.As a distinctive linguistic phenomenon, speech act has received a lot of attentionfrom linguists. However, with the development of cognitive linguistics, more andmore scholars find traditional pragmatic study is not enough in explaining thisphenomenon because it does not offer a systematic and satisfying explanation of thelanguage users’ cognitive process.In1997, Panther and Thornburg put forward speech act metonymy, interpretingspeech acts from a cognitive perspective. They think an action scenario consists ofthree phases: the BEFORE, the CORE/RESULT and the AFTER. In a metonymicmechanism, each phase can stand for the whole scenario, so language users can invokethe whole speech act scenario by mentioning a phase of the scenario. Later, this theoryis supplemented with relevant pragmatic parameters.The analysis of directive speech act metonymy in this soap opera leads to thefollowing findings:First, both single and combined structures of speech act metonymy are adopted inthe four characters’ language in the American soap opera Desperate Housewives. Thestructure CORE takes the largest part of single structures while the combination ofBEFORE+CORE tops first in all the combined structures.Second, the specific employment of structure varies with the subtype of directives.Most of the order and request are realized by means of CORE/RESULT or BEFORE,while most threatening acts are realized by AFTER or CORE+AFTER.Third, the specific employment of structure varies with the character. Thisphenomenon can be accounted for by social factors and the personality of languageusers.Fourth, pragmatic parameters and the degree of wanting are of great help inlanguage production, but not so explanatory when it comes to the assorting of directivespeech acts into different subtypes.This thesis analyzes and explains people’s employment of speech act metonymyfrom both the cognitive and pragmatic perspectives as well as the face-saving function of speech act metonymy. As the American soap opera Desperate Housewives hasusually been studied from the perspective of discourse analysis, this study may shednew lights on its study by providing a new perspective and a new method.