A Pragmatic Study Of Chinese Counselors’ Speech Act Of Advising

The Speech Act Theory is one of the most important theories in pragmatics. It presumes that the minimal unit in human communication is "speech acts", not clauses or sentences. "Advising", as a typical directive, is not only widely employed in daily conversation, but also involved in verbal interaction in institutional settings as well, such as in mentoring, teaching, TV programs or counseling, etc. A good knowledge of the realization patterns and characteristics of "advising" may help facilitate the mutual understanding between the communicative parties. Meanwhile, pragmatic failures, interruptions, misunderstandings would be avoided.Up till now, although many studies have been done on the theories and techniques of counseling based on psychology, little attention has been paid to the study of counseling language which plays a vital role in counseling. What is more, studies conducted based on Chinese data are rare. This thesis sets out to examine the speech acts of advising. It is an empirical study grounded on exclusive Chinese data which was collected from classical counseling books, the website of counseling and authentic materials from counseling centers in our university. It explores the types and realization patterns of advising in Chinese on the basis of Searle’s speech act theory. Meanwhile, the study also investigates the strategies utilized by the counselor in giving advice in the institutional setting. And at last, it examines the pragmatic features of the advising speech acts.It is found that the speech acts of advising performed in Chinese counseling can be classified into four types, i.e. directive, persuasive, suggestion and instruction according to the strength and power of advising. And in performing the speech act of advising, different advising strategies are employed in response to three major concerns:the establishing of a good counselor-visitor relationship, the protection of the visitor’s face and the strengthening of the power of advising. In the end, pragmatic features of advising speech acts are uncovered from three layers. Lexically, mitigative modal particles and modal verbs are utilized to soften the imposing force of advising. Syntactically, the declarative sentences are most frequently used in giving advice. Semantically, sentences about reasons for performing an act are prominent.It is suggested that the counselor tend to perform different types of advising with different pragmatic strategies employed in performing the speech act of advising in order to avoid the directness of advising. A good command of the pragmatic features of advising language facilitates the counselor in performing advising.