| The thesis discusses the utterances of American online petitioning from the pragmatic perspective.Petitioning refers to a group activity through which the citizens appeal to their government for the redress of grievances.It can either be in an oral or written form.Petitioning can be interpreted as a goal-directed speech act at the macro-level,constituted by a variety of interconnected utterances as sub-speech-acts for particular supportive purposes at the micro-level.Generally speaking,not only do petitioners state the facts of the issue but also express their objectives for performing the act of petitioning.Therefore,the focus of the thesis is on how such situation-specific goals are realized by particular speech-act-oriented utterances.The online petitioning platform makes it possible for large numbers of citizens to petition,and thus for researchers to get the first-hand material and study them from the different aspects.Differing from the previous studies from historical,political,social and literary views,the thesis is to analyze American online petitioning from its macro structures and micro-level acts in a speech-act theoretical fashion.The eleven petitioning discourses analyzed in this thesis are all from the online petitioning platform Change,org.And the research questions are:1)What is a pragmatic understanding of the essence of petitioning?2)What are the canonical speech acts used in the realizations of purposes of petitioning?And 3)How do these canonical speech acts vary in their intensity and what are the mitigation devices?The findings can be summed up as follows:first,petitioning is a goal-oriented speech act at the macro-level,containing a series of sub-speech-acts.Among them,there is a head speech act and auxiliary speech acts.The head speech act refers to the most relevant utterance to the goal of petitioning,and the auxiliary speech acts serve to explain,set conditions for,or conclude the head speech act.Henceforth,the head speech act,to most extent,represents the general goal of the petitioning and the goal could be detected by ignoring the details that are not directly relevant to the understanding of the petitioning.Second,the goal of petitiorung is realized by various speech acts,among wlhich the most canonical speech acts are demanding,requesting,appealing and advising.Felicity conditions,context and performative verbs work together to distinguish or identify the specific speech acts.Third,these four typical speech acts are in the same category of directives according to Searle’s taxonomy.But they differ in the intensity based on the imposition on hearers.The sequence of intensity from strong to weak is demanding,appealing,requesting and advising.Although citizens have the right to petition to government,they still tend to use mitigation devices to soften the imposition from different aspects such as lexical,syntactic ways and conventional indirectness.Theoretically speaking,the present study elaborates the speech act theory by providing the authentic utterances in real online petitioning.Practically,the findings of this study could demonstrate to citizens the wonder of making a powerful and persuasive petitioning.At the same time,the study could somehow give insight to daily communication in properly making a request. |
