A Multimodal Corpus-Based Study On Interactions In Speech Act Of Request

Since its advent in the 1950 s,speech act theory has drawn considerable attention in the field of pragmatics.However,its researches are overwhelmingly confined to linguistic aspect of the verbal mode.Few have analyzed the non-verbal modes employed in speech acts such as hand gestures,facial expressions,body movements,which can interact with linguistic mode through the meaning-making process.Therefore,this paper aims to carry out a multimodal discourse analysis of speech act of request to further analyze the interrelations among the different modes in meaning construction and communication.Resorting to a corpus-based empirical study,we establish a multimodal corpus with 240 movie clips concerning request,which are extracted from Oscar Award-winning films over the last fifteen years.The current study not only discusses the construction and embodiment of the requestive meaning via multiple modes but also explores how meanings are constructed both in verbal and non-verbal modes.The results showed that there is a significant correlation between social factors and the choice of request strategies in regards to verbal modes.For non-verbal modes,social factors like social distance,power and imposition also play an essential role in the use of non-verbal modes.Following the principles of multimodal interaction,the current study also found that different request strategies can distinguish the complexity and density of non-linguistic modes.The non-verbal modes are not only the duplication of meaning already made in speech but also the complementary devices to speech.Therefore,verbal and non-verbal modes,on the one hand,make a great contribution to meaning construction of request,respectively;on the other hand,they also interact to produce an integrated meaning.The value of this thesis lies in the alignment of request speech act theory and multimodal interactional analysis.It provides a new perspective for the speech act study in pragmatics.This study emphasizes the concept of multimodal meaning,analyzing the meaning of request speech act from a multimodal perspective,which has referential value for the interpretation of speech act meaning and second language teaching.