A Pragma-Cognitive Interpretation Of Ironic Face-Threatening Directives In Modern Chinese

Threatening speech act is seen in daily conversation frequently. Generallyspeaking, it occurs in the circumstance where the speaker tries to make the listenersurrender. In modern Chinese,(1)“NP+敢(gan)+VP”, for example,“你敢开枪!”(nigan kai qiang!; How dare you fire!);(2)“NP+再(zai)+VP”, for example,“你再往前一步，试试看!”(ni zai wangqian yibu, shishikan!; Dare you step forward!) and (3)“NP1+让/叫(rang/jiao)+NP2+VP”, for example,“我让/叫你吃!”(wo rang/jiao ni chi!;How dare you eat!) are usually adopted as the ironic threatening directives whichexpress the opposite meaning of the literal meaning. Most of the studies on theseconstructions are briefly mentioned when talking of the gan, zai, rang and jiao,whereas the studies on the whole construction are relatively less. Although a fewscholars have an eye for these constructions from the semantic, syntactic andpragmatic perspective, there have been scarcely researches on these threeconstructions from the cognitive perspective.This paper studies “NP+敢(gan)+VP”,“NP+再(zai)+VP” and “NP1+让/叫(rang/jiao)+NP2+VP” from a pragma-cognitive perspective based on the datacollected from Corpus of Chinese Language collected by Chinese Language ResearchCenter of Peking University (CCL for short). The thesis tends to analyse theproduction and comprehension mechanism of Ironicl Face-Threatening Directives(IFTD for short) in line with Relevance Theory. The purpose and the pragmaticfunctions of IFTD on the basis of Politeness Theory and Speech Act Theory are alsodiscussed in this thesis.This thesis consists of five parts, which are listed as follows:Chapter One presents a general introduction, including the motivation andobjectives, methodology and data collection as well as layout of this thesis.Chapter Two provides a literature review of this threatening speech phenomenonand studies on IFTD, including the definition and the classification by the author. Onthat basis, the achievements and limitations of the previous studies are discussed. Chapter Three offers a brief introduction to the theoretical basis of this thesis,including Relevance Theory, Politeness Theory and Speech Act Theory.Chapter Four attempts to interpret the generation and comprehension mechanismand the pragmatic functions of IFTD based on the application of the theory in theexplanation of “NP+敢(gan)+VP”,“NP+再(zai)+VP”, and “NP1+让/叫(rang/jiao)+NP2+VP” three constructions. The syntactic and semantic features ofthese constructions are presented as well.Chapter Five deals with the conclusion and two contributions of this study:Firstly, this study analyses the syntactic and semantic features of the threeconstructionsSecondly, the paper first applies Relevance Theory (RT), Politeness Theory (PT)and Speech Act Theory (SAT) to analyse the production and comprehensionmechanism of IFTD together with the pragmatic functions of the constructions.