A Dynamic Pragmatic Study Of Shopping Conversations As A Speech Activity Type

From of old, buying and selling has been an everyday social activity. With the current development of market economy, shopping has now become an indispensable part in people's life. The process of shopping is usually accompanied by conversations between customers and salespersons. Shopping conversations does not only appear as an element in shopping but also affects the progress of this activity.In the history of linguistics, there were few studies concerning shopping conversations. The most outstanding might be those conducted by the systemic-functional linguists represented by Hasan, Martin, etc. who related "service encounters" in their study of genre. They analyzed the major components and sequential organization of the genre of "service encounters", and then pointed out their functions accordingly. However, there is still a lack of study on shopping conversations from a pragmatic perspective.Based on the previous studies, the thesis adopts the viewpoint and methodology of dynamic pragmatics, and conducts a dynamic pragmatic study of shopping conversations within J. Thomas (1995)'s framework of speech activity type.The data for analysis in the paper were all recorded in the real shopping places and then transcribed as soon as possible, which guaranteed their authenticity and accuracy. By describing and analyzing various pragmatic elements, the paper endeavors to explore the characteristics of linguistic means employed by the participants to achieve their respective goals in shopping conversations, as well as the communicative effects produced in the specific context. The main purpose of this study is to examine how the participants, given and constrained by an initial context, actively use linguistic means to control conversations and eventually to achieve their communicative goals.The study acknowledges the dynamic nature of context, and claims to understand and study shopping context in a dynamic way. Meanwhile, the study shows that shopping is a goal-directed social activity, and all the particular linguistic forms used...