Study On Speech Act Nouns Used As Shell Nouns In Modern Chinese

As an important theory in the field of pragmatics, speech act theory has attracted wide attention of domestic and foreign scholars. However, compared with the speech act verbs, which are always the research hot spots, little research has been done on speech act nouns. On the basis of senior scholars, this paper attempts to define speech act nouns and how they used as shell nouns, make a list of speech act nouns in modern Chinese, do a classification of different usages of speech act shells, and analyze the pragmatic strategies brought by the speech act nouns when they used as shell nouns.The paper includes six chapters:Chapter1is an introduction. It discusses the object, the tasks, the methods and the value of this study, reviews the previous researches, including the development of speech act theory, Schmid’s shell noun theory, and related researches of speech act verbs and nouns in modern Chinese. It also introduces the source of the examples and the corpus tagging method.Chapter2defines the concept of speech act nouns, makes a distinction between two kinds of them. A list of240speech act words has been made according to the tasks of the study, and the syntactic distribution of speech act nouns has been briefly described.Chapter3summarizes the semantic features of speech act nouns and puts forward that speech act nouns can be used as shell nouns in specific contexts. It points out three basic functions of speech act shells, which can distinguish them from other shell nouns. It also makes a comparison between speech act verbs and speech act nouns, summing up that speech act nouns have their own uniqueness when they describe the illocutionary force. Chapter4makes a classification of different usages of speech act shells from three viewpoints. First, it distinguishes between self-oriented reference and other-oriented reference. Then it differentiates backward reference, forward reference and single reference. At last, it finds difference between present reference, reappeared reference and summary reference. Meanwhile, a variety of linguistic instances have been fully described in this chapter.Chapter5analyzes eight pragmatic strategies brought by speech act shells. These strategies can help the conversation participants improve the efficiency of communication and achieve specific communicative effect. They are with obvious practical and guiding significance.Chapter6is the main conclusion of this paper. It also points out the shortcomings of this study, and makes a prospect of future research.