The Speech Act Of Advice-giving In Journey To The West

In 1962,Austin published How to Do Things with Words,and then Speech Act Theory came into being.From then on,scholars began to do researches on these speech acts such as request,refusal,promise,apology,among which advising is also a hot topic.For studies on advice,most of them illustrate this phenomenon from the perspective of Grice's Cooperative Principle,Leech's Politeness Principle,and Brown and Levinson's Face-saving Theory;from the point of the research object,the studies on advice also mainly concentrated in the daily conversations and institutional discourse,but few in literary works.As a famous Chinese classical novel Journey to the West,it contains typical characters full of interest and literariness.And it has been translated into so many languages with great influence in the international world.However,studies on it from the perspective of linguistics are slightly insufficient,let alone the advice-giving speech act in it.Therefore,the author integrates qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis together,collects valid and valuable dialogues about advice from Journey to the West published by People's Literature Publishing House by reading through it.Based on the data collected,the author elaborates the linguistic features and classifications of the advice in Journey to the West,and analyzes the pragmatic strategies of advice in Journey to the West,and then adopts Adaptation Theory to explain why the speech act of advice-giving can be realized.After the study,the author finds that there are four kinds of advice when analyzing from two aspects.They are introductory advice,initiative advice,simple advice and complex advice.And the strategies used in Journey to the West include using addressing terms,explanations,results and praise respectively with advice message.Besides,the speech act of advice-giving is a result of adaptation to different factors in the advice giver's and the advice receiver's mental,social and physical world,such as personality,emotion,belief and motivation in their mental world,time and place in their physical world,leader-member relationship,master-apprentice relationship,identity and friendship in their social world.This thesis tries to employ Speech Act Theory and Adaptation Theory to studies on advice-giving speech act,which broadens the theoretical perspective of the advice-giving speech act.Besides,this thesis taking Journey to the West as the object of study enriches the contents and issues of the advice-giving speech act and can be a good complement to the previous studies on Journey to the West.Moreover,it provides a more systematic way to understand advice-giving strategies which can help achieve successful communication.A certain reference value exists in terms of language teaching,intercultural and interpersonal communication.