A Socio-pragmatic Critique Of Other-prefaces In Chinese Academic Monographs

Preface,a special form of written style which we most Chinese understand as Xu,enjoys a history of more than two thousand years in China.Preface/Xu has found its way in Wen Xuan(????)as an important independent style in the Southern Dynasty(AD 420-589).Preface is normally divided into‘self-preface'(SP,written by the author him/herself)and‘other-preface'(OP,written by someone else)in accordance with the preface writer.SP aims to illustrate the aim and writing procedures of the book,while OP is meant to introduce or comment on the content of the book.As a significant part of the book,OP functions as a key to help readers understand the book.The quality of the OP will directly affect readers'attitude towards the book.In recent years,the study of OP has been conducted from a certain linguistic perspective,and it is usually confined within discussion of generic structures and politeness phenomena in OP.However,its writing styles and contents,especially those in a Chinese academic monograph,are ignored.Why do some OPs help readers understand the book well while others seem to fail to do so?With this in mind,this thesis attempts to answer the following four questions:(1)What contents or elements does an OP usually contain?(2)Can all the contents or elements in an OP play the introductory role in the book and thus help readers understand the book itself?(3)What makes a well-formed OP,if there are ill-formed ones?(4)Is there any pragmatic failure in the practice of OP composition with Chinese academic monographs? What is the cause?According to the classification number of books,two hundred and fifty OPs in Chinese academic monographs ranging from linguistics,literature to translation studies from the year 2005 to the year 2015 are collected in this thesis.We start a descriptive research on the OP for the generic elements,before calculating the different relevance degrees of these elements in association to the readers' understanding on the book itself,based on Sperber & Wilson's(1986/1995/2003/2008)Relevance Theory(RT).Lastly,we explore the pragmaticfailures in OPs at hand orienting towards relevant critiques and causal analysis.The research findings are as follows:(1)OPs usually cover thirteen generic elements,but they are not equally necessary to all OPs and they do not occur in the same one OP;(2)Not all of these thirteen elements play the introductory role in the book.The optimal relevant elements are: field statement,book description,book features,book values and book weakness.The weakly relevant elements are: relationship statement,book author introduction and book author evaluation.The irrelevant elements are: preface-writing motivation,self-abasement,research anticipation,publication congratulation and book recommendation.(3)All of these elements can assist readers in achieving the maximal level of relevance to understand the book and its other aspects,but a well-formed OP should at least contain five optimal relevant elements.(4)There exist some pragmatic failures which prevent readers getting the optimal understanding on the book,and thus weaken OP's functions.A typical OP pragmatic failure is the lack of the optimal relevant elements.Other pragmatic failures can be found too,like grammatical errors,typographical errors and inconsistent contents.It is cultural values,publishing conditions and the relationship between preface writer and book author that jointly cause the OP pragmatic failures.This thesis attempts to study the current situation of OPs in Chinese social science monographs,which is of significance in several aspects.Theoretically,the present study is the first attempt to apply the Relevance Theory to OPs,hopefully to enrich the explanatory power and adaptability of Relevance Theory to written discourse.Practically,this thesis enriches preface studies,be it SP or OP.In addition,it is to be revealing to future studies of preface writing.