A Pragmatic Approach To The Speech Act Of Advising In The Academic Spoken English

Although numerous researches have been conducted to explore the speech act of advising in daily conversation and institutional discourse,few scholars have paid attention to advising in English academic spoken discourse.Therefore,the present study will mainly probe into the linguistic structures and mitigation strategies of advising employed in the academic spoken discourse,with the purpose of offering reasonable ways for the interlocutors to perform the speech act of advising effectively.The data were from MICASE,attempting to address three research questions:(1)What is the distribution of three categories of the speech act of advising in English academic spoken discourse?(2)What are the linguistic structures of the speech act of advising in English academic spoken discourse? And what linguistic structures are frequently used?(3)What are the mitigation strategies of the speech act of advising used in English academic spoken discourse? And what strategies are frequently used? In order to answer the questions,the present study applied the framework of linguistic structures and strategies used for making suggestions summarized by Abolfathiasl & Abdullah(2013)and the framework of mitigation strategies in making suggestions proposed by Li(2010)to analyze the data.The study has yielded the following results:(1)There are three types of strategies used in performing the speech act of advising,namely,direct,non-conventionally indirect and conventionally indirect strategy.More than half of the speech acts of advising in the academic spoken discourse are performed by the interlocutors employing the conventionally indirect strategies,and the direct and non-conventionally indirect strategies are less used,especially the non-conventionally indirect strategies.The potential reasons for this phenomenon have been analyzed in detail.(2)As for linguistic structures,imperatives and negative imperatives have been frequently used,and the linguistic structure of “let?s…” is also frequently employed,but the linguistic structures of performatives are rarely used among the direct strategies in the academic spoken discourse.In terms of the non-conventionally indirect strategy,its three types of linguistic structures are not frequently employed by interlocutors in the academic spoken discourse.However,the conventionally indirect strategy is used in high frequency in the academic spoken discourse,in which the linguistic structures of modals and semi-modals are used with a high frequency and the conditionals are also frequently employed.However,the wh-questions and yes-no questions are less used by interlocutors among the conventionally indirect strategies.(3)The present study also aims to investigate the mitigation strategies of advising used in the academic spoken discourse.The results indicate that the interlocutors prefer the internal redressive actions to external redressive actions.With regards to the internal redressive actions,downtoners are the advisors? first choice,and it is followed by subjectivizers and cajolers,and the other mitigation strategies are less used in the academic spoken discourse.As for the external redressive actions,the grounders are employed with a high frequency in the academic spoken discourse,and it is followed by the imposition minimizers,but other strategies are less employed.The present study,from a theoretical point of view,gives an overall presentation of the linguistic structures and mitigation strategies of advising employed by advisors in the academic spoken discourse,and it also offers some beneficial enlightenments.Furthermore,the mitigation strategies used in advising are carefully discussed,which will enrich the exploration of the speech act of advising and provide a theoretical basis for future research.Practically,the present study will offer ways for the interlocutors to perform the speech act of advising effectively in the academic community.In addition,various strategies to perform and mitigate the speech act of advising may be valuable resources for English language teaching and learning.The study,therefore,contributes to developing learners? pragmatic competence when performing the speech act of advising.