Interpreting Request Speech Acts In The Grand Courtyard Of The Qiaos:A Perspective Of Image Schema

Request speech act, as one type of directives, has been the focus of research in pragmatics and sociolinguistics since Speech Act Theory was proposed by Austin (1962) and developed by Searle (1969). Linguists and researchers both at home and abroad have made great contributions to this research field. As pointed out by Liu Guohui (2002), traditional studies of request strategies mainly concern the analysis and induction of how people process vocabulary, syntactic structures, and arrangement of discourse when they attempt to perform requests. Nevertheless, different research perspectives linguists employ lead to different research results. Therefore, there is no surprising that these results appear to be unsystematic. Searle (1975), Brown and Levinson (1978) and Blum-Kulka (1989) all come to different conclusions from their own perspectives, especially Blum-Kulka, who divides the request strategies into three major types and nine smaller sub-types, utilizing the research method of "Discourse Completion Test" (DCT). Although achievements they make have reached a widespread scope and many relevant theories are generated, traditional pragmatic theories still have some defects in terms of request speech acts. The advent of cognitive linguistics broadens people’s horizons on the study of request speech acts. According to Mendoza and Hernandez (2002), request speech act, as one type of directive speech acts, can be interpreted by force image-schema, which is instrumental in explaining the consistent cognitive mechanism behind the seemingly unrelated request patterns.Request speech act is one of the commonly used speech acts in our daily communication, and is regarded as a kind of face-threatening act. In order to coordinate the purpose of requests and politeness needs, speakers usually adopt different request strategies to save others’faces. Based on Image Schema Theory put forward and systemized by Geogre Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1987), this thesis attempts to make an exploration on request speech acts of different kinds of request strategies adopted by the characters in famous Chinese novel The Grand Courtyard of the Qiaos.The Grand Courtyard of the Qiaos, written by Zhu Xiuhai, is a legendary novel about the "business genius", Qiao Zhiyong, who saves his family business and realizes his dream of covering remitting system and his circulatory work all over China. This famous novel enjoys great popularity both at home and abroad. Although some scholars have done researches on this novel, they mainly focus on such aspects as its theme, business ethics and characters, and few scholars analyze it from linguistic perspective. Therefore, the present study tries to interpret request speech acts in The Grand Courtyard of the Qiaos by utilizing modern cognitive linguistic theory.After the analysis of request speech acts in this novel, the present study finds that the request strategies the characters employ fall largely into three categories:1) direct request strategies; 2) conventionally indirect request strategies; 3) unconventionally indirect request strategies. Among the three categories of request strategies, direct request strategies are the most frequently employed ones in this novel. Apart from direct strategies, conventionally indirect request strategies are the second widely used ones. Besides, motivations for implementing different kinds of request strategies employed by the characters in this novel are further explored from the perspective of force image-schema and the characters’personalities reflected by their use of requests are also discussed, which is helpful for readers to comprehend speech acts as well as the people’s communication on a deeper level, and to know about the characters’personalities together with social relationships among them in this novel, so that this novel can be better interpreted. Furthermore, through the exploration of different request speech acts in The Grand Courtyard of the Qiaos on the basis of image schema, the effectiveness of the cognitive approach to the interpretation of request speech acts is also better illustrated and verified. It is hoped that the applying a cognitive approach to the interpretation of literary text The Grand Courtyard of the Qiaos can further supplement and enrich pragmatic theories and related language researches. In addition, it can also deepen the understanding of speech acts, as well as the main characters’personalities in literary texts. All in all, The Grand Courtyard of the Qiaos is a famous novel, and therefore, it is hopeful that this study may shed some lights on the understanding of this novel and may provide a new angle and a new method to the study of it.