A Study Of Indirect Speech Act In Romantic Conversations

Language is the information carrier and the indispensable part of daily life as well.The language people use will be affected respectively in different occasions as well as in different interpersonal relationships,among which romantic conversation is the most special one with its own special faculty and has been attracting the attention from a lot of researchers.Austin thought that language can not only convey information,but also can be used to do things,which means language is closely related to act.Searle perfected Austin's Speech Act Theory and proposed the Indirect Speech Act.The initial researches of indirect speech act mainly focused on single verb or sentence.With the exploration into indirect speech act being deepened,the researchers turned to investigate different perspectives of indirect speech act,from traditional grammar to semantics and to the combination of pragmatics and cognitive pragmatics.However,researches on the indirect speech act in romantic conversations are limited.The present study approaches indirect speech act from the social distance between two genders in romantic relationship and apply off-record strategy which is one of the politeness strategies in Face Theory proposed by Brown & Levinson as the theoretical basis.Moreover,the thesis explores the application of off-record sub-strategies in indirect speech act in romantic conversations.The daily conversations between men and women in different stages of love in the popular American TV series Gossip Girl are selected to establish the corpus for the study.Quantitative,qualitative as well as traditional documentary method are adopted to analyze the off-record sub-strategies in indirect speech act,the present research mainly discusses the distribution of the fifteen off-record sub-strategies in romantic conversations.All the sub-strategies are illustrated with examples.Finally,this thesis investigates the effect of employing the same sub-strategy in different love phases.The major findings in this thesis are as follows:Firstly,the classification of off-record strategy raised by Brown & Levinson is appropriate for explaining the indirect speech act,but not inclusive.In romantic conversations,indirect speech acts used by women are more than those used by men.Moreover,no matter women or men,in conflict phase or non-conflict phase,the most frequently used sub-strategy is “give hint”.Secondly,in conflict phase,distributions of off-record sub-strategies used by men are more balanced than women.However,in non-conflict phase,the distribution of off-record strategy used by men and women are essentially the same.As for the application of indirect speech act,men enjoy using indirect speech act to convey their humor while women always employ indirect speech act to avoid confrontations.Thirdly,in different love phases,the same off-record sub-strategy used by men or women may exert different effects.For example,in non-conflict phase,using the off-record strategy will not threaten the hearer's face.Conversely,the application of sub-strategies shortens the psychological distance between couples and reflects the intimacy between them.By probing into the indirect speech act in lovers' daily communication,this investigation widens the research scope of indirect speech act and supplements off-record sub-strategies in politeness strategy.Furthermore,it can demonstrate the feasibility of applying the off-record sub-strategies in Face Theory to analyze indirect speech act.Finally,some enlightenment could be offered to people who are in love relationship concerning how to communicate well in daily life and to reduce or avoid the misunderstandings.Although this thesis provides some implications,a large amount of room is still left for further investigation into indirect speech act concerning romantic conversations.