On Pragma-rhetoric Style In Conversations Of Zhuangzi

Pragma-rhetoric has become a hot issue in recent years and many scholars at home and abroad have done some research on this field. Their findings indicate that the integration of these two subjects has been applied to daily conversations or literary works. Thus based on their research this paper will integrate pragmatic theories and rhetorical theories to discuss Zhuangzi’s conversations, aiming to prove the feasibility and significance of their combination.The rhetorical theories mainly include active rhetoric and passive rhetoric which were put forward by famous rhetorician Chen Wangdao. Since pragmatics and rhetoric both consider language use as the key research object, many scholars hold that speech act theory could be applied to combine them together. And locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act corresponds to rhetorical act, rhetorical purpose and rhetorical effect. Thus we propose pragma-rhetoric act, pragma-rhetoric purpose and pragma-rhetoric effect based on speech act theory and rhetorical process.We take both speaker and hearer into our consideration and explore both of their pragma-rhetoric act and pragma-rhetoric purpose and discuss pragma-rhetoric effect on the basis of their reaction and behaviors.Our data comes from the conversations of Zhuangzi, in which the conversations are classified into9categories according to the status and relations between the speaker and the hearer and then16pairs of conversations are chosen to be analyzed and discussed. The findings reveal that there are many interactions between speech act and rhetoric act. So we select ten groups of conversations to conduct quantitative analysis. We find that passive rhetoric and direct speech act usually play the equal role in communication. Active rhetoric and indirect speech act interact in most cases. In addition, we combine reception rhetoric strategy and conversational implicature to analyze how conversational meaning is expressed in the condition of value-added and value-reduced reception. The results show that in these two situations philosophical thought can be conveyed since the readers can infer the purpose of Zhuangzi.By analyzing and discussing the conversations in Zhuangzi with this method we draw a conclusion that pragma-rhetoric research on Zhuangzi provides us another way to study Zhuangzi’s thoughts and literary values.