Directive Speech Acts In A Doll's House: A Perspective Of Speech Act Metonymy

Panther and Thornburg(1997)categorize metonymy into predicational metonymy,referential metonymy and speech act metonymy from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics.They propose that speech act,which is like the action scenario,can be seen as the speech act scenario.Each speech act scenario has three parts: the BEFORE,the CORE and its RESULT,the AFTER.The thesis studies the directive speech acts of the main characters,Nora and Helmer,in Ibsen's play A Doll's House from the perspective of speech act metonymy.To be more exact,it is the study of the distribution of the five kinds of directive speech acts of characters' utterances in the speech act scenario.The five kinds of directive speech acts are request,begging,advising,ordering and threatening.Together with the analysis of strength of metonymic link and the prototype effect of category,the significance of characters' utterances in the different phases of the scenario will be illustrated.This thesis,within the theoretical framework of speech act metonymy,attempts to answer the following questions:(1)What is the distribution of the five kinds of directive speech acts of Nora and Helmer's utterances in the speech act scenario in A Doll's House? What is the significance of the distribution?(2)Which one of the five kinds of directives has the highest frequency of occurrence?(3)What are the signs of Nora's departure from home from the directives she uses?Based on Searle's taxonomy of directive speech acts,this thesis applies Panther and Thornburg's speech act metonymy to the analysis of the distribution of the five kinds of directives of characters' utterances,and finds that the frequency of occurrence of the five kinds of directives in different phases of the scenario is not the same.Most utterances of advising are in the BEFORE of the scenario;most utterances of ordering,request and begging are in the CORE and its RESULT of the scenario;most utterances of threatening are in the AFTER of the scenario.First,according to the strength of metonymic link and the prototype effect,Nora and Helmer's utterances in different phases of the scenario are further analyzed and explained.It can be found that the directives in the CORE and its RESULT of the scenario are the most powerful in metonymically activating the scenario;that is to say,the strength of metonymic link in the CORE and its RESULT of the scenario is the strongest.If the position of the directives is farther away from the CORE and its RESULT of scenario,the strength of metonymic link is dependent on the ability to metonymically activate the scenario.Second,in the category of directive speech acts,the directives in the CORE and its RESULT of scenario are the prototype member,and the directives in the BEFORE and AFTER of scenario are at different non-prototype levels according to their distance from the CORE and its RESULT of scenario.In the five kinds of directive speech acts,the ordering speech acts used by Nora and Helmer are most,so they are prototype members.Third,Nora uses a lot of directives to speak for herself,so she is not in aphasia.Her departure from home is predictable from a large number of directive speech acts in her language.This research focuses on the detailed analysis of directive speech acts and deepens the study of directive speech acts.In addition,it illustrates the practicability and flexibility of the prototype effect of category by analyzing the strength of metonymic link and prototype effect of Nora and Helmer's utterances in A Doll's House.This thesis provides a perspective for the analysis of characters and the language features in literary works,and it also shows a linguistic perspective for the interpretation of Nora's running away from home in A Doll's House.