Commissive Speech Act Verbs

In the 1950s, J. L. Austen, a British philosopher, put forward speech act theory, which soon aroused common interest of both linguists and philosophers. Afterwards, the theory was further developed by Searle, an American linguistic philosopher, and has found positive application and development ever since. Speech act verbs, as a means of performing speech acts have been one of the linguists' concerns and been widely discussed to different degrees. This paper aims to analyze one kind of the speech act verbs - commissives in modern Chinese with reference to speech act theory. The present research will be done from two perspectives: syntactic and pragmatic. The former aspect will include the analysis of semantic features and syntactic rules while the latter the analysis of illocutionary force and its classification, implied rules and secondary devices.The thesis consists of five parts. Part 1 is an introduction. It first reviews what other researchers, both at home and abroad, have done concerning speech act theory and the basic concepts of the very theory. Then it outlines the current situation in the research of speech act verbs and proposes the object, theoretical backup and implication of the present paper. Part 2 discusses the definition to commissive verbs and their signifying range. Part 3 describes the commissive and non-commissive usage of the Chinese verb "承诺" respectively. The former case involves such four aspects as speaker, hearer, message, and illocutionary force while the latter case six aspects such as propositions irrelevant to the speaker or hearer and the ones concerning past action. Part 4 , these Chinese verbs are divided into four categories, in the same method as used in Part 3 with its focus on the differences of these verbs from the verb "承诺". Part 5 concludes the discussion and analyzes the differences of the verbs in question. In the end, the paper gives these verbs a simple classification and summarizes their commissive and non-commissive usage.