A Study On The Speech Act Of Comforting In Chinese

This thesis attempts to conduct a descriptive study on the realization of comforting in the Chinese context from a pragmatic perspective, based on the speech act theories and politeness theories. A systematic investigation is carried out in terms of strategies in the realization of the speech act of comforting, the effect of relative power and gender, and the utterance patterns on the realization in the Chinese context.This study adopts both a qualitative approach and a quantitative approach. A Discourse Completion Test (DCT) is designed to collect data from altogether 182 sophomores and seniors in Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, 172 of whom produce valid responses for analysis. The strategies, the effect of relative power and gender on the choice of the strategies and utterance patterns in the realization of comforting are carefully analyzed. Besides, the rules for performing the speech act of comforting are examined in the study.Chapter 1 is a general introduction, which gives a brief account of the need for the study, the aim of the research and issues to be discussed in this paper. Chapter 2 is an overview of the studies on speech act theories and related politeness theories, providing a theoretical background of the present study and the specific speech act of comforting. Chapter 3 is a brief introduction to the research methodology including subject, instrument, procedure, and so on. In Chapter 4, the collected data are analyzed in detail and the distribution of comforting strategies and the influences the social factors like relative power and gender have on the choice of the strategies are explored. This chapter also gives us a description of comforting in aspects of its taxonomy belonging to and rules for performing the speech act. Chapter 5 is the conclusion of this research, talking about findings, limitation and at the same time offering some suggestions for future studies in the speech act of comforting.