Theanalysis Of Speech Reporting From The Pragmatic-rhetorical Perspective

In daily communication, in order to get a particular effect and purpose, the speaker (expresser)often quotes or reports others’ speech and people call this speech phenomenon as the speechreporting. The speech reporting is a fundamental and universal rhetorical action as well as acomplicate pragmatic phenomenon. It is also called “quotation”, or “reported speech” accordingto researcher’s different motivations and habitations. In this paper, the author takes Xin Bin’sterm about speech reporting. Oppose to the narrative speech which belongs to the speaker or theauthor himself, the speech reporting is from the character in a novel or other sources. All in all,it is a ubiquitous and inevitable speech phenomenon.Among traditional researches, speech reporting is simply regarded as a rhetorical action, andmost scholars mainly study its form conversion and stylistic characters. In the early1970s, afew scholars try to discover new fields, and they start to concern the pragmatic aspect of speechreporting, Volosinov (1973), Tannen (1986), Xiu Jiujiu (1996) and Tang Qingye (2004) arethose outstanding ones. However, during recent years, a new researchperspective—Pragmatic-rhetorical perspective draws the attention of both foreign and nativescholars. This theory pours fresh blood into language researches by blending pragmatics andrhetoric. But it is not given enough attention in the area of speech reporting. So this paper triesto further study speech reporting from pragmatic-rhetorical perspective and explores the secretsbehind it.The author intends to blend theories such as Speech Act Theory, Cooperative Principles and Adaptation Context Theory in pragmatics with rhetoric and applies these theories on speechreporting study. The major method is case study based on data, the data range from nets, newsto novels and daily communication. In this way, it can enhance the reliability and validity of thefinial results.In summary, through detailed case studies, the author testifies the feasibility ofpragmatic-rhetorical theory on speech reporting study, and shows the realization program ofspeech reporting’s pragmatic meaning, and then makes a summary on the rhetorical motivationsof speech reporting. In fact, each rhetorical act is out of some motivations, and speech reportingisn’t an exception. The application of speech reporting is indeed an illocutionary act and byperforming this act, reporter wants to get expected perlocutionary effect or satisfies the originalmotivation. However, both of them are mostly realized by violating maxims in cooperativeprinciples. Besides, Context is an element that cannot be ignored in the realization of pragmaticmeaning and the choice of speech reporting’s mode.