Fuzzy Rhetoric In Mrs. Warren’s Profession From The Perspective Of Contextual Adaptation Theory

Fuzzy language is commonly used in our daily life, which plays a very important role in our communication. A lot of experts have studied fuzziness from different scopes such as semantics, pragmatics, philosophy and so on. And fuzziness also evoked the great interest of rhetoric field. So the study of fuzzy rhetoric came into existence. Fuzzy rhetoric is actually the fuzzy language materials people have carefully chosen in order to improve verbal expression effect. Previous related studies are mostly on the principles, the features and classification of fuzzy rhetoric, but study has been rarely done from Contextual Adaptation Theory, much less on fuzzy rhetoric in drama dialogues.Drama is an important and special literary genre which is featured by a lot of dialogues. Mrs. Warren’s Profession is the masterpiece of Bernard Shaw, who is one of the greatest players in the world. Mrs. Warren’s Profession mainly focuses on torture that women have suffered under capitalist system and the reality that morality has given its way to money in capitalist society. The drama deeply expressed critique of Bernard Shaw on social reality in capitalist system. So the study of Mrs. Warren’s Profession can help people have a better understanding of Bernard Shaw.Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory holds that the process of language use is the process of continuous choices. Adaptability is the core of Adaptation Theory. In order to adapt to the mental world, social world and physical world, people constantly make language choices. As mentioned above, fuzzy rhetoric is actually the fuzzy language materials people have carefully chosen in order to improve verbal expression effect. So Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory can offer appropriate explanations to the motivations and functions of fuzzy language in Mrs. Warren’s Profession.The thesis takes Contextual Adaptation Theory as the theoretical framework, the dialogues in Mrs. Warren’s Profession, also including stage instructions as the corpus to analyze how the characters in Mrs. Warren’s Profession use fuzzy language to adapt to contextual factors. This thesis will employ qualitative and descriptive methods to conduct the research. After the detailed study, it is found that the employment of fuzzy language is the result of choice-making in communicative activities. In order to adapt to the mental world, the physical world and social world, utterers in Mrs. Warren’s Profession used fuzzy language as an effective and proper method to achieve certain communicative goals. The fuzzy language used in Mrs. Warren’s Profession to adapt to the mental world means adaptation to the utterers’ and interpreter’s cognition and emotions such as wishes, moods and intentions. The fuzzy language used to adapt to time and space realizes the adaptation to the physical world. And the fuzzy language used to choose appropriate language in accordance with current social occasion makes the realization of the social world. The study not only has theoretical, but also practical significance. The thesis will enrich our understanding of language characteristics of Bernard Shaw. At the same time it will make a complement and penetration of dialogue research of Bernard Shaw. So to some extent it has certain theoretical significance. Compared with previous related studies, this thesis has different objectives and methods. So readers can have a new perspective to comprehend and appreciate drama dialogues. It also has certain practical meaning in translating and teaching of drama dialogue.