The Studies On The Zero-responsibility-to-discourse And Its Application In Interview Genre

"Discourse role" is an important term in pragmatics analysis, especially discourse analysis, it can be researched from the relation between communicative participants and discourse information. In verbal communication,"discourse responsibility" is realized through communicative participants responsible for the discourse information, when a speaker is completely not responsible for discourse information, we call it "zero-responsibility-to-discourse"(ZRD).ZRD is one special discourse responsibility relation with significant practical value in pragmatics, however, its significance did not receive particular attention and thorough discussion in past studies. This thesis, basing on the study of corpora from TV interviews, thoroughly analyzes matters such as the definition, characterization types, practical features and applicable register of ZRD, considers the proper use of ZRD is a markedness discourse phenomenon, and in the meantime, specifies that proper adoption of ZRD as a discourse strategy can exert great influence in speech communication. This thesis also demonstrates that the register of interview enables the adoption of ZRD more prominent than others.This thesis consists of five chapters, the main content of each chapter as follows:Chapter1is the introduction to the thesis. It specifies and introduces the subject under study, shows the significance of this thesis, elaborates on the logic of reasoning and defines the corpora used for the study.With consideration of previous relative study on discourse roles, we focus our study on ZRD, firstly, we determine that discourse responsibility is a very important criterion to distinguish discourse role. Different discourse roles are realized through speakers take the different responsibilities of the discourse in communication. When a speaker is completely not responsible for discourse information, we call it ZRD, it is one special discourse phenomenon, and thus it becomes a focus research in this thesis.Chapter2introduces ZRD, and demonstrates its markedness property through comparison.By reviewing the theory of markedness, it specifies discourse responsibility, as a means of communication, has its discrepancy in markedness. In accordance with the comparison of "full-responsibility-to-discourse"and"part-responsibility-to-discourse", it’s clear that ZRD is the most marked member. At the same time the reasons for its most marked property are analyzed from the pragmatic and cognitive two aspects, thereby improve the definition of ZRD.Chapter3discusses on the categorization of ZRD, and meanwhile analyzes respective speech features and practical characteristics of the three types of ZRD.Through the discussion of the criteria for categorizing ZRD. we reach the conclusion that the source of information should be an important criterion in that the ultimate difference between ZRD and the other two "responsibility-to-discourse" lies in the fact that the speech information provided has other sources, so the information source should become the important basis of classification. According to the credibility of the source and the distance between it and communication, ZRD consist of two categories of three kinds of cases:one is the information source is on the scene; the other is the information source is not on the scene, it can also be divided into information from "sure third party" and "need not be investigated for third party" two kinds of cases. This chapter also describes the linguistic representations of each case, and analyses the psychology of the speaker who use them through demonstration from corpora.Chapter4explores the influences register exerts on the application of ZRD.By first reviewing the theory of register, we decide on three factors that affect the application of ZRD:communicative topic, relationship among each participants and communicative objective. We then compare and contrast the application of ZRD in different registers, analyze the influences of each factor and eventually specify the more advantageous register for better realization of the application of ZRD.Chapter5concludes the whole thesis, illustrating the main discovering of the thesis and limitations of the study. This thesis mainly focuses on the responsibility-to-discourse of discourse role, and confirms the establishment of ZRD by the contrastive analysis and concrete corpus, with further understanding of discourse role. There are three original opinions in this paper. First, the research of ZRD is in terms of markedness, conclude that ZRD is a marked property discourse phenomenon; second, there are three models of ZRD, whose functional differences are due to the source of information; third, the three models of ZRD proves that interview is an advantageous register for participants to adopt ZRD to realize its communicative function and to make it prominent as an important speech strategy.