A Pragmatic Study Of Deception

The study intends to analyze DEC in Legend of ZhenHuan applying AdaptationTheory. By describing the realization of DEC in Legend of ZhenHuan and analyzing theadaptation to contextual correlates in Adaptation Theory, the thesis aims to find thepragmatic functions of DEC.Language is an essential part in daily life while DEC has been an importantpragmatic strategy. Some scholars have made researches from various perspectives indifferent fields such as linguistics, philosophy, psychology, rhetoric and so on. However,in light of the previous researches on DEC limitations still exist. The definition of DECis non-uniform and the classification of DEC is not distinct. The corpus is static andelicited but not natural utterances. Therefore, the study intends to apply Verschueren’sAdaptation Theory (Verschueren,1987) to analyze various DEC in Legend of ZhenHuan.Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory focuses on the property of language: variability,negotiability and adaptability. It put forward that communication is a dynamical processof language choices which is determined by various elements such as the contextualcorrelates. DEC, as an important and universal strategy in communication, is fit to applyAdaptation Theory to study. The application of DEC in practice must adapt tocommunicative context, thus this study attempts to analyze adaptation of DEC to thecontextual correlates.The Chinese TV play, Legend of ZhenHuan, is from a successful historicalliterature work where the linguistic phenomenon varieties and great proportion of DECoccurs. But by mow, there is still no English version of Legend of ZhenHuan, and it istoo difficult for the author to change data into English with original meaning, thus allthe data in this thesis are still in Chinese. On the basis of He Ziran’s (2006) definition ofDEC the author collects35pieces of DEC from the TV play to build a mini corpus.With the quantitative method the author counts the occurring frequency of each DEC inline accordance with He Ziran’s (2006) classification. The forms of expression of DEC is expounded with the qualitative method. Based on the analysis with examples, majorfindings are presented: DEC in Legend of ZhenHuan adapts to the context including themental, social and physical world; in pragmatic functions the thesis concludes positiveand negative aspects. Major findings can have a good suggestion for language users toutilize DEC successfully. The study of DEC can provide a new angle for furtherresearch in the field theoretically and guide language users to choose proper strategy incommunication skillfully. However, the study has certain limitations which providesome space for further researches on DEC. What’s more, it can supply certain researchmaterial for the study of Legend of ZhenHuan.