A Study On The Speech Act Of Threats In Chinese

The speech act of threat is such a complicated ones, it should be a kind ofcommitment-direction. The speech act of threats is dependence, unfinished, subjective andasymmetric, it’s formed by propositional conditions, preparatory conditions, sincerityconditions and general conditions, it also can be changed by increase or reduce someconditions, change the force of some conditions or the patterns of execution. From thediscourse structures, the act of threats can be divided into central speech, auxiliary speech andmodifier. In the speech act of threats in Chinese, there are five kings of discourse structure:central speech alone, auxiliary speech alone, central speech in combination with auxiliaryspeech, central speech in combination with modifier, auxiliary speech in combination withmodifier. By the data analysis of corpus, there are five application strategies in the speech actof threats in Chinese: tell the authority, harm one’s profit, depress one’s wishes, obscure thecondition of threats and obscure the result of threats. There are also four strategies in how toavoid using threats: replace the result by explanations, avoid being the subject, be polite andseek the common interests.