A Study On The Speech Act Of Chinese Cursing

Cursing is a particular and important phenomenon in communication.Till now,there are many studies from the perspective of social linguistics and folklores,and many of them are limited to the study of cursing language.As to the speech act of cursing itself,few of scholars put in their effort to study it in the field of pragmatics.The current study makes a comprehensive analysis about cursing by using Speech Act Theory,Reference Theory,and Pragmatics Strategies Theory,and contains the following two aspects:First of all,it redefines cursing language based on the former studies,and reveals three elements of cursing.Moreover,according to the new definition,it differentiates the speech act of cursing from the cursing words and other related speech acts.Secondly,the strategies used in the act of cursing are analyzed based on three parts.First of all,it analyses the sequence of cursing language,and indicates that the type of sentence including three parts synchronously is uncommon.Instead,the types of"two-part"or even"one-part"constitute primary forms.Then,it studies the functional syntactical types of the central speech act.It shows that in the aspect of functional syntactical types,multiple exclamatory sentences and declarative sentences are the major measures to make a curse.Thirdly,the investigation focuses on the situations of the functional realization by using reference and predication in the part of Central Speech Act.The further research centers on the distinctive feature of cursing,that is,reference solely can function as cursing.Then,it describes the strategies of cursing by using reference only or using reference and predication together respectively.