An Analysis Of Pragmatic Functions Of Chinese Net-swearing From The Perspective Of Speech Act Theory

For human beings, language is an important approach to express their ideas and emotions, people usedifferent language forms to express their emotions. And among all of the language forms using swear words isan indispensable way to abreact their negative emotions. In Chinese traditional culture, swearing is consideredas a rude and impolite act, yet as the researches show that swearing is not an infrequent act. When it comes toswearing, it relates to psychological, social and cultural factors, in different contexts, swearing has manifoldpragmatic functions and various psychological and socio-cultural implications. Online swearing is not anuncommon phenomenon with the thriving of the Internet. While as the development and standardization ofinternet, swearing on the internet is restrained, and netizens change the forms of the swear words a lot, sonet-swearing is quite different from the original form of swear words. Therefore, we should pay attention to thisissue in an attempt to understand not only the linguistic features of the variations of net-swearing, but also thepragmatic functions contained in the Internet communication.This thesis takes "Sina Microblog" as the studied object which holds a large number of netizens and corpus.On the Internet, netizens utilize characters that are quite different from conventional Chinese swear words toexpress their inner thought, which makes net swearwords produce many metamorphoses in cyber space. Thisthesis tries to answer these questions: first, what are the categories of Chinese net-swearing and its characters?Second, what are the pragmatic functions and the effect of Chinese Online Swearing from the perspective ofspeech act theory?This thesis employed speech act theory and is based on the literature review and data collection which tryto classify the net swear words and analyze net-swearing‘s pragmatic functions and its effects. Depend on theformation of Chinese swear words and the linguistics classification of English swear words, the Chinese-netswearing was classified into seven categories. Next, analyzing the swear words in each category on speech acttheory, the pragmatic functions of net-swearing are as the follows: the function of taboo, the function of abuse,the function of politeness, the function of banter, the function of concealment and the function of exclamation.What‘s more, there are five characteristics of the Chinese net-swearing, they are malapropism, deconstruction,irony, exaggeration and metonymy.