| This thesis,on the basis of speech act theory,aims mainly at investigating the performative verbs in news English with five categories previously proposed by Searle(1979):Assertives,Directives,Commissives,Expressives,and Declarations.Through a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods,this study concerns itself with the use of performative verbs by virtue of the newspaper section of Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA-NEWS)and Corpus of China Daily(COCD)with the purpose of identifying the distributional patterns,syntactic features and illocutionary forces of performative verbs.And the main findings are as follows:In the first place,as to the distributional patterns,the quantitative results suggest that the general distributions of performative verbs in American news are significantly different from those in Chinese news.In terms of the specific distributions of performative verbs across different types,there is a significant difference between American news and Chinese news in the distributions of Directives and Expressives,whereas there is no significant difference regarding Assertives,Commissives and Declarations.In addition,with respect to the syntactic features,the five categories of performative verbs share the categorial properties.As far as the grammatical properties and thematic properties are concerned,they bear the similarities in the external argument and its thematic role;that is,they take an NP subject which plays the thematic role of agent.However,there are differences in the internal argument and its thematic function across different types,namely:Assertives can be used with that-clause,Directives permits a clausal complement,Commissives is immediately followed by nonfinite clause introduced by to-infinitive,Expressives occurs with clausal complement headed by the preposition for,and Declarartions subcategorises a clausal complement or an NP complement.Moreover,the clausal complement has no thematic function,while the NP complement bears the thematic role of theme.Last but not least,regarding the illocutionary forces,the further investigation of performative verbs,based on the examples extracted from corpora,reveals that different illocutionary forces are conveyed by using different types of performative verbs.For instance,Assertives has the illocutionary force of expressing speakers'assertion,Directives is used to represent speakers' want and desire,Commissives contains the illocutionary force of conveying speakers' intention,Expressives involves the speakers' attitudes towards the state of affairs,and the illocutionary force of Declarations is to change the state of affairs.Therefore,this corpus-based study of performative verbs is of significance in theoretical level and practical level.Theoretically,it provides additional information for the study of performative verbs from the new viewpoint.Practically,the present study contributes to a better understanding and application of performative verbs,benefiting not only journalists and readers but also teachers and learners. |
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