Font Size: a A A

A Pragmalinguistic Analysis Of The Speech Act Fundraising

Posted on:2005-11-13Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:H Y XiangFull Text:PDF
GTID:2155360125965164Subject:English Language and Literature
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
Fundraising pervades our lives. It surrounds us with attempts to influence us to feel, to think, and to act. Researches on fundraising have been undertaken, however, from the perspectives of law, management and auditing. Few studies have been conducted to language for fundraising, especially on linguistic and pragmtic focuses. Is the language composition for fundraising an arbitrary one? Are there any internal mechanisms or regularities in its performance? Can they be supported and explained by linguistic and pragmatic theories? All these perplexed issues still remain unaddressed and will be the concentrations of our analysis.Based on the authentic material such as fundraising proposals, advocates, letters, e-mail letters, slogans and advertisements collected, we endeavor to uncover the regularities underlying in language form within pragmaliguistic framework and disclose the pragmalinguistic strategies in fundraising. We elicit a hypothesis that there exists some internal mechanisms or regularities in fundraising language on which pragmalinguistic theories have explanatory power. And examples in fundraising language may provide some implications for effective fundraising. We discovered the language for fundraising is very complex, varied and dynamic and is not organized at random but influenced by a variety of forces on the ground of the fundraisers intentional manipulation of the whole linguistic systems. Thus pragmalinguistic patterns such as Narrativity, Causality, Numeration, Commitment, Suggestiveness, Thankfulness, Addressor& Addressee Orientation have been worked out. In addition to that, as a communicative activity, evidence shows that a great quantity of fundraising data in verbal form is an intentional manifestation to the potential audience on the part of the fundraiser which echoes Sperber and Wilson's standpoint of OSTENSION (2001, 49) in communication. The audiences' involvement of inference in fundraising suggests that Grice's INFERENTIAL MODEL of communication has explanatory power to fundraising language. It seems to us that both Grice's and Sperber and Wilson's communicative theory can serve to explain the fundraising communicative activity. Furthermore, with regard to the pragmalinguistic strategies that we have so far disclosed in this thesis, all the strategies that fundraisers implemented, for the sake of influencing the audiences' action via language, be it Performing, Implicating, Politeness and Economy, proof that pragmatic theories such as SA, CP, PP and Zipf's Least Effort Theory have explanatory power in some genres of verbal texts such as fundraising as well as conversational data. Conversely, data on fundraising language can function as examples to support these above mentioned theories. We hope this analysis will fill in the gap in the linguistic sphere concerning the language of fundraising. We hope it will enrich the range of research in the world of language and will shed light on English learning and teaching in China.Despite of all the above discoveries, there still exists certain limitations in this paper, when viewed in the scope of analysis, a focus that is simultaneously too narrow and too broad. On the one hand, there is much more to be touched upon than what we covered in our paper. On the other hand, the relatively comprehensive taxonomy conjunction with article length restrictions has left our treatment of concerned analysis rather brief. The research so far conducted is only a preliminary involvement, and further in-depth work is appreciated from the following aspects: Firstly, as an investigation of the internal pragmalinguistic mechanisms underlying data of fundraising, this analysis might have left certain regularities undiscovered. Further studies might be done to fulfill its exhaustiveness. Secondly, as we all know language exists in time and changes through time, the study on the fundraising language at a certain point or period in time and the investigation of it as it changes through time might be of great academic value. So it would be a...
Keywords/Search Tags:Language for fundraising, Pragmalinguistics Framework, Patterns, Strategies
PDF Full Text Request
Related items