A Study Of The "Commissives" Speech Act In Contemporary Chinese

Pragmatics is an independent subject to study using language that established anddeveloped in the70s to80s. It is actually an interdisciplinary field of study because it needdraw support from other subjects’ theory knowledge, such as psychology, sociology, etcduring its study progress. Speech act theory is the core theory of pragmatics with importanttheoretical and practical significance, which was improved by an American linguist calledSearle for the theory of human communication. This article is based on the Searle’s speechact theory, combined with the practical Chinese closely. It treats the promising as the researchobject and start with the newspapers and magazines which are closed to daily life.This article briefly introduces the Austin and Searle’s speech act theory. After theresearch of domestic speech act we found that the research of Chinese commitment speechact is weak so we ascertain the research scheme of this article.Secondly, this article gives a detailed explanation of Chinese commitment speech acts offour constructive rules. The two standards of commitment propositional content’s conditions:a person is talking to the commitments must be linked with a future behavior; the promisedfuture behavior must be conducted by the speaker. The two criteria of commitmentpreparatory conditions: the listener like the speaker to carry out what he promised to do; thespeaker believes that the listener is willing him to implement his commitment. The conditionof commitment sincerity is that the speakers sincerely obeys to his commitments and intendto implement what he says. The fundamental conditions of commitment directly pointed tothe results of speech act, that is, the speaker assume the duty to do something. This articlegives explanations of the four standards through some Chinese examples.Thirdly, this article divides commitment into direct and indirect aspects. Directcommitment is the commitment with core commitment language. It is usually used withauxiliary language. This article focuses on the analysis of speech pattern of directcommitment and the composition and function of auxiliary language. The indirectcommitment has its own fixed form. The commitment which could be easily implied theimplications through the literal meaning is conventional indirect commitment. Thecommitment which couldn’t be implied through the literal meaning and need bilateralcontextual knowledge and other principles is unconventional indirect commitment. Thisarticle classifies and explains the two types of commitment by some data.Finally, this article put forward with some regulatory principles which are suitable forChinese commitment speech act. It mainly analyses four factors which affect the intentions of pragmatics, including the status of speaker, the occasion and purpose of commitment, thedifficulties of the commitment event, collateral and witness objects. This article also discussthree control variables which help achieve the commitment speech act, including return andrewarding strategy,compensateory, penalty and self-deprecating strategy and also theexaggerated strategy. They can help the speaker maximize the pragmatic purpose ofcommitment.