On Pragmatic Functions Of Repetitions In One Day

Repetition as a common language phenomenon not only occurs in our daily communication but also in various kinds of literary works, such as poems, novels, argumentations and so on. Although it was once thought to be a marker of disfluency and redundancy, recent studies have shown that repetition is an essential part of daily communication. Repetition has been increasingly recognized as a "human social activity, clearly part of our everyday conduct or behavior".One Day is a fiction published in 2009. Each chapter covers the lives of two protagonists Dexter and Emma on 15 July, St. Swithin’s Day (a traditional Irish festival) during the twenty years. The novel generally received positive reviews, and was named 2010 Galaxy Book of the Year. The linguistic materials employed in this present study are collected not only from the conversations but also from the narration part of One Day. The aim of this dissertation is to describe and analyze the pragmatic functions of repetition in the popular fiction One Day under the guidance of speech act theory and other related linguistic theories.Traditionally, there are eight kinds of repetitions from four different perspectives. Firstly, repetitions can be classified into full repetition and partial repetition by considering their structure. Secondly, from the perspective of object, there is allo-repetition and self-repetition. Thirdly, repetitions can be divided into immediate and intermittent with the location in an utterance into consideration. Finally, there is the conscious repetition and subconscious repetition. In this thesis, we only include the conscious repetition into our consideration. Based on part of the previous classifications of repetitions, we will provide a new angle to divide the repetitions in One Day. We will classify the repetitions from three perspectives: context-determined repetition, component-determined repetition and repetition types from the speech act perspective. There are four pairs of repetitions in the context-determined category:self-repetition and allo-repetition; complete repetition and incomplete repetition; immediate repetition and intermittent repetition; conscious repetition and subconscious repetition. From the perspective of component, repetitions can be sort into three categories:lexical repetition, syntactic repetition and discoursal repetition. Lastly, from the speech act perspective, repetitions in One Day can be divided into four kinds:locutionary and illocutionary; illocutionary and illocutionary; perlocutionary and perlocutionary; locutionary and locutionary.With the concrete and detailed classification of repetitions, repetitions in One Day have some features to make them unique in the whole novel. Firstly, repetitions occur more frequently in the conversation than in the narration part. Secondly, repetitions in One Day are used consciously to achieve certain pragmatic and interactional functions. Thirdly, different kinds of repetitions are adopted in different contexts to meet the communicative needs. Fourthly, through the analysis of repetitions in the novel, we can know more about the participants’ education backgrounds and social statuses. Last but not the least, repetitions as speech acts are sometimes conducted successfully. If not, the speaker will use another repetition as a supplement to make the conversation continue. With speech act theory into consideration, the repetitions in One Day not only emphasize the words’ literal meanings but also perform other specific pragmatic functions such as agreement, humor, connecting topics and so on. Based on the study, the author easily come to the conclusion that the pragmatic functions of repetition in One Day can be separated into eight categories:as an information-adding device; as a humor-creating device; as an attention-drawing device; as a participation-showing device; as an emotion-expressive device; as a clarifying device; as a cohesive device; as a stalling device. The pragmatic functions of repetitions vary a lot in different contexts, so it is safe to say that the understanding of repetitions goes close along within the bonds of contexts.