A Comparative Study Of The Perlocutionary Act Failure In Chinese And English

Perlocutionary act refers to the effect of the illocutionary act, and it is an indispensable part of the speech act theory. There are a large number of cases in our conversations which the perlocutionary acts do not turn out to be the speaker's illocutionary points. In these cases, we consider them as perlocutionary act failures. We collected the conversations from modern movies and television pieces as our data and adopted a quantitative approach in our study.This paper attempts to examine the perlocutionary act failure in two aspects: the reasons and the strategies. It tries to find out the concrete reasons causing the perlocutionary act failure, and the strategies adopted by the participants to remediate the failure. In addition, it also makes a comparison of the findings between Chinese and English examples in order to reveal the similarities and differences of the two languages within this field.The paper consists of five chapters. In chapter one, a brief introduction is presented to the study of perlocutionary act at home and abroad. Besides, it also describes the methodology of the study in detail. In Chapter two and Chapter three, detailed data analysis is made.Chapter two is devoted to find out the reasons that causing the failure of the perlocutionary act failure in terms of the participants' responsibility during the communication. The results show that there are three reasons from the speaker's side and four reasons from the hearer's side as well as one from both of them.Chapter three is devoted to deal with the remedial strategies adopted by the participants. According to the research, six kinds of strategies can be used by the speaker and two used by the hearer and another two used by the third party.In Chapter four, the reasons and strategies of the two languages are analyzed systematically based on the former study. The results show that the two languages share some similarities but also some differences in some aspects. To be exact, the two languages show their differences in terms of the reasons causing the perlocutionary act failure, and similarities in terms of the strategies. However, in detail, as far as the strategies used to remediate the failure caused by each particular kind of reason, the strategies in English are relatively stable and centralized than those in Chinese. Later in this chapter, I search for the reasons from the cultural and social factors briefly. It is found out that the cultural factors mainly contribute to the differences between the two languages, and the social factors the similarities of the two.Finally, a conclusion is made in chapter five. The major findings of the study are summarized along with the theoretical and practical implications of the study. In addition, some limitations of the present study are mentioned with some proposals of further research in this field.