On Speech Act Set Of Nagging In Desperate Housewives

A speech act set is a combination of individual speech acts that, when produced together, comprise a complete speech act (Murphy and Neu, 1996). Often more than one discrete speech act is necessary for a speaker to develop the overarching communicative purpose or illocutionary force– desired. It suggests that"speech act set"performs prospectively in analyzing complex speech act. And this paper concerned study in nagging with the"speech act set".This thesis consists of seven parts, focusing on speech act set of nagging in Desperate Housewives, covering methodology statement, qualitative analysis, quantitative analysis and some other findings related with speech act set of nagging. Four questions are put forward for this research beforehand. Is nagging in Desperate Housewives in suit with the speech act set theory given by former research? How many and what components are used in nagging of speech act sets in Desperate Housewives? Are there any inherent characters in speech act set of nagging and its components? Are there any common features of speech act set of nagging used in different environment? Do these features have something to do with the external variables?Scenes are extracted from target source and these four research questions are studied. Results of qualitative study and analysis proof that nagging is speech act set comprised of components of Complaint, Request & Order, Assailment & Erotesis, Statement, Abuse & Damn, Reminder and other minority components. Character of each component is studied by analyzing their representation in the Scene.Two inherent features of the speech act set of nagging, known as repetition and tone strength variety, were found on the other perspective of research, results of quantitative study and analysis.A supplement analysis other than qualitative and quantitative studies also answer the fourth question, which found some external factors that affect speech act set of nagging, including topic and theme of nagging, the relationship between nagging and the interlocutors'status and power, as well as that between nagging and their social distance.