A Study On Speech Act Verbs Introducing Direct Speech In English

Speech act verbs are the ones that represent the performative function of speech acts.This study takes the speech act verbs introducing direct speech as the subjects and appliesimage schema transformation to classify and analyze these verbs. There are two reasons fortaking speech act verbs introducing direct speech as the subjects: One is there are not somany studies on speech act verbs introducing direct speech so far, the other is that thesentences with speech act verbs introducing direct speech are in match with path-focus toend-point-focus cognitive image schema transformation, which leads this study into thecognitive field.Through comparing traditional approach and cognitive approach, it points out that thelatter is on the basis of the former and speech act verbs introducing direct speech are definedas: the speech act verbs that introduce direct speech and express the performative function.From the theoretical aspect, the path-focus to end-point-focus image schema transformation isstudied and applied in this study which composes of Force Tendency and cognitiveProminence.Taking three series of college English intensive textbooks as the corpus, this paperclassifies all the speech act verbs introducing direct speech and highlights quantitativestatistics with related examples, in order to prove the explanation of image schematransformation on speech act verbs and deep comprehend the speech act verbs introducingdirect speech and their features. Specifically speaking, this study answers three researchquestions:1. What are the English SAVs used in introducing direct speech (SAVIDS) in thedata?2. How many types are these SAVIDS divided into, according to force tendency?3.How do these direct speech sentences where these SAVIDS are form image schematransformations by force tendency?Firstly, this study reveals that speech act verbs introducing direct speech and the oneswithout introducing direct speech are all the same formally, but several of these verbs aredifferent semantically. For instance, tell in the structure tell somebody to do something means“want somebody to do something” that must depends on the content of direct speech in directspeech sentences. It is different from another meaning of tell as “transmit the information”.Thus, tell is divided into tell1and tell2.There are40speech act verbs introducing direct speechin the corpus, according to their meanings.Secondly, according to Zhong Shouman’s (2008b) related research achievements, theseSAVIDS have been divided into four categories: SAVIDS of general right force tendency, SAVIDS of special right force tendency, SAVIDS of right-left pair force tendency andSAVIDS of interactive force tendency. Among them SAVIDS of right-left pair force tendencyis novel in this study. At last, under the condition of dividing these force tendencies, everyelement of the example sentences operation processes has been discussed in detail：theseverbs play explaining roles on direct speech in sentences, that is, the direct speech theyintroduce is always focused on by the readers’ attention. When the direct speech moves on thepath from the performer to the performee, the path attracts the attention at first, and then thefocused attention stops at which the direct speech is received. Finally, the direct speech getsfurther analysis because of the attention.The significance of the study is that it puts forward the less popular SAVIDS as studysubjects and it extends the study on image schema transformations. And a novel forcetendency has been found out in this study. Moreover, the most important is the applicationstudy on their combinations. The limitations of the study are the small quantities of materialsin the corpus and some study results still require more detailed analyses. In future studies,much bigger corpus and questionnaires, tests and other methods can be adopted to deeplyprove this study’s achievements.