A Pragmatic Study Of The Personal Reference Shift In A Dream Of Red Mansions

This dissertation is a study of personal reference (PR) and personal reference shift (PRS) in A Dream of Red Mansions (DRM) in the perspective of Speech Act Theory (SAT). The study is based on the conversations in DRM as the data, addressing such questions as PR, PRS and the types of PRS in DRM, the account for this phenomenon, the working mechanism and the pragmatic effects of PRS.There are 7 chapters in the dissertation. Chapter 1 is an introduction to the significance of the study, its rationale, data and methodology. Chapter 2 makes a critical survey of the previous researches on PRs and the studies of PRs in DRM in both traditional and pragmatic approaches. Chapter 3 sets a new model of PRS based on SAT. Then Chapters 4, 5 and 6 provide the data to testify the new model and make some modification to it. Chapter 7 summarizes the major findings and significance of the study.Before establishing my new model, I first clarify the notions of PR and PRS and classify them. PR is defined as the way a speaker adopts to address or refer to the participants involved in the course of communication, while PRS is concerned with the dynamic use of PRs. It refers to the process that a speaker selects PRs among various choices. Such a selection is a marked form, different from the conventional way a speaker adopts to make PRs to the participants.With a critical review of SAT and the special features of PRS, I propose my new model for PRS in DRM, claiming that making PRS is performing a speech act since there are speaker's intentions hidden in each PRS. Two important notions, markedness and distance, are expounded, with the former as the standard for PRS and the latter as the major mechanism in working out the intention or the force of PRS.According to such a model, when a person makes PRS, he/she is performing a speech act. The first act, the locutionary act, is the act of making PRs, the basic function of which is to establish a conventional role relation between participants. Whether this locutionary act contains speaker's intentions or not is determined by markedness. When there is markedness in PRs, it is regarded as PRS; and that is an illocutionary act, the second act. The illocutionary force of PRS is to change the original and conventional role relation between the interlocutors. According to the forms of PRS, there are three types, pronominal PRS, nominal PRS and phrasal PRS. In working out the intended force behind PRS, an addressee can use the distance working mechanism to infer the intention of a speaker. When the illocutionary force of PRS is detected by the hearer, he will make response to the speaker. That is the perlocutionary act, the third act.I use the data in DRM, namely, pronominal PRS, nominal PRS and phrasal PRS to respectively testify my new model. The most obvious speech acts performed by the pronominal PRS are the changing of the original communicative role relations. For different kinds of pronominal PRSs, there are different distance working mechanisms and different effects. As for the case of plural for singular, the speaker has three choices for changing the distance between him/her and the addressee or the third party. Firstly, for such pronouns as zanmen, niwo, whose intrinsic range of reference includes both the speaker and the addressee, can be used to denote one side of the communicative participants. In this way, the speaker could either include the addressee in the range of reference or put himself/herself into the range of the addressee. Secondly, for such pronouns as women, nimen, tamen, whose range of reference is much wider than that of the respective singular wo, ni, ta used to denote the corresponding singulars. In terms of distance, the speaker has enlarged the range of distance. Thirdly, for the prounoun women, which is used to denote the third party, there is a shift of distance in the process. By pronominal PRS, one can perform a lot of illocutionary acts, such as showing intimacy or politeness, increasing intimacy, decreasing the tone of complaint, etc. In personal pronoun shift, e.g. renjia, ren, etc. which are usually pronouns denoting the third party, are used to denote the first person, the distance working mechanism goes in this way: The change of the role relation indicates a change of distance, from a proximal to a distal one. Therefore, the speaker can lessen the tone of complaint by extending the distance between the speaker and the addressee. In style shift, e.g, nujia, nu for wo, and ru for ni, the distance of the change lies in the distance between the written and oral styles. Such a distance accounts for the effects for such speech acts of pronominal PRS as increasing the degree of intimacy or humorous effect. At the same time, the usual use of wo, ni, ta and the marked use of wo,ni and ta are also presented.The nominal PRS differs from the pronominal PRS in that the content and range of nominal PRS are more a concern of society (instantiated by kinship terms and social terms) and emotion (instantiated by emotional terms). These terms, by their denotations, reflect the distance relation between participants. For example, in terms of social distance, a role relation reflected by kinship terms is much closer than that by social distance. In terms of psychological distance, a role relation reflected by intimate terms, is much closer than that by honorary terms. Therefore, in nominal PRS, it is the semantic aspect of address terms that the language participants use to show the distance. By changing the distance between the participants, a speaker can perform such speech acts as apologizing, flattering, persuading, showing gratitude and seeking for forgiveness, etc. After such an investigation, I modify the integrated model I have proposed. In addition to the secondary speech act of PRS–"changing the original role relation", which is proposed in the original integrated model, PRS can perform two other kinds of acts, namely,"stressing of role relation"and"creating an intended role relation".The case of phrasal PRS is much more complicated than pronominal and nominal PRS. Their peculiarity lies in their complex structural properties. Therefore, almost all phrasal PRSs are used markedly for their complexity in form. In phrasal PRS, what matters is mainly how a phrasal PR is made up of. As a result, the study of the forces of phrasal PRSs and their forms are combined together. With such a discussion, an improvement has made to the original distance working mechanism. That is, a speaker chooses different points of view in referring to the others according to the different psychological distance and communicative intentions. A new principle, the principle of intention is put forward for the choice of point of view. Many speech acts are connected with such phrasal PRSs, such as boasting, enlivening the atmosphere, begging for pardon, mocking, scolding, provoking, cursing, etc.