A Study On The Speech Act Of Modern Chinese Conventional Indirect Accusation

Speech act theory is one of the important theory of pragmatics.It has developed into mature theoretical system so far.In the speech act,sometimes the speaker's speech intention is different from the literal meaning,then this is called "indirect speech act".According to whether between the indirect language and the literal illocutionary forces exist conventional corresponding relation,indirect speech act can be divided into the conventional indirect speech act and the unconventional indirect speech act two types.However,at present the study of the former is far less thorough than the latter.So we want to take the speech act of modern Chinese indirect accusation as an example to explore the relationship between the language form and indirect illocutionary force.The paper includes five chapters:Chapter 1 is an introduction.It starts from the origin of the topic,expound the research object and research task of this study,and reviews the existing research of scholars at home and abroad.The review object including the study of indirect speech act and the study on the speech act of modern Chinese accusation.On the basis of this,we illustrates the significance,the method,and the source of corpus and its labelling of this study.Chapter 2 defines the concept of "the speech act of modern Chinese indirect accusation".It analys the concept category of "accusation","criticism" and"complain",proposes the constitutive rules of speech act of accusation.It distinguishes direct accusation and indirect accusation,as well as the conventional indirect accusation and the unconventional indirect accusation,so that clarifying our research object.Chapter 3 reconstructs the source of indirect illocutionary force of accusation on the base of the research of Searle(1975).The study finds there are three kinds of force source,including ask the listener's error performance,ask the reason of why listener implement his error performance,and ask the listener's ability to correct the error performance.Subsequently it lists the conventional formats and statements of each type of illocutionary force source.Chapter 4 disscuss the realization of the illocutionary force of modern Chinese conventional indirect accusation from different levels,namely those conventional formats how to realize the indirect illocutionary force of accusation with the corresponding language expression.The study found that rhetorical question sentence is the holistic pragmatic feature of conventional indirect accusation,indirect illocutionary force of accusation are all derived from the speaker's negation on the listener's perfomance,and the central pragmatic function of conventional indirect accusation is to reduce the face threat to the listener.Chapter 5 is the main conclusion of this paper.It summarizes the principal conclusions and the research value of this study,puts forward the deficiency in the process of research,then prospects the direction and vision of future research.