A Historical Pragmatic Study Of English Farewells With Special Reference To British Drama In Renaissance And Realism

Farewells,as expressive speech acts,have received rich attention in historical pragmatic field abroad.Studies on farewells in this perspective mainly deal with specific forms and shift of pragmatic functions in the history of Old English,or from the 15 th century to recent days or in the history of America,etc(Lebsanft,1988;Hauser,1988;Jucker,2011,2017).In addition,studies on farewells at home from the perspective of historical pragmatics have been understudied.The current thesis aims to take British Renaissance and Realism as historical periods,English drama from William Shakespeare,George Bernard Shaw etc.as data,adopting the self-creating and manually-labeling research method,combining Lima's(1995)model of language change with Brown & Levinson's(1987)politeness theory as theoretical foundations,to shed light on manifestations of farewells,distinctions of farewells,influencing factors and politeness interpretations.The research finds:(1)Manifestations of farewells are grouped into four categories in light of illocutionary force and the definition,embodying as parting-closing as illocutionary force,thanking-closing as illocutionary force,promising-closing as illocutionary force and blessing-closing as illocutionary force both in Renaissance and Realism.(2)From Renaissance to Realism,manifestations of farewells in each group have distinctions through comparing,showing as distinctions in frequency and specific forms.Frequency embodies as increasing,decreasing and no change.Distinctions among specific forms are presented as the differences of identification,simplification of formats in coexisting forms and new occurrences.(3)Social reforms promote the developments of farewells.Reasons include social positions and economic settings showing as strict strata and hierarchy and Industrial Revolution,religious faiths and secularization.(4)In this social context,politeness interpretations of farewells are revealed.It reflects that in Renaissance,negative politeness plays an essential role,while in Realism,positive politeness is unfolded.The change of politeness cultures reflects the tendency from negative to positive politeness.In a nutshell,studies of farewells in this field make contributions in both theoretical and practical implications for further studies.It not only offers new paradigm for analyzing distinctions and changes of languages from historical pragmatic perspective,sheds light on politeness interpretations of farewells,but also provides a practical instructive guidance for social communications with proper valedictions.