A Study On The Speech Act Of Suggestion From Parents To Children

Austin,the British philosopher of daily language analysis,puts forward the renowned Speech Act Theory in 1950 s.Subsequently,his student Searle makes a further revision to the theory.Influenced by their theories,people begin to further recognize that language can not only be used to describe the colorful outside world,but also can be used to talk about and change the world.That is to say,when we speak language,it also implements a kind of behaviors such as stating things,asking questions,giving instructions,making requests and so on.Since the theory of speech act was put forward,the speech act of suggestion,a member of directive speech acts,has received much attention from home and abroad.Based on the previous studies,this empirical study is grounded on the suggestion given by parents to their children whose age is mainly from 6 to 8.All the data are collected by questionnaires,the interviews with parents and the conversations between parents and their children.Then the data are analyzed qualitatively with the Speech Act Theory from these perspectives such as types,syntactic characteristics,illocutionary forces and strategies.At last,two other strategies which are unique to parent-child suggestion are also pointed out.Hopefully this study can provide some guidance for future research in suggestions given by parents to children,and aid parents in giving effective suggestions to their children.There are five chapters in this paper.Chapter One is the introduction part.It respectively presents the rationale,the research questions and purpose,the significance,and the layout of this paper is also included.Chapter Two incorporates the illustration of the Speech Act Theory,the definition and classification of suggestion and previous studies on the strategies for suggestion.Chapter Three deals with the methodology,including the participants,source of the data,research method and data analysis.Chapter Four presents the results and discussion of the research.A detailed analysis of the classification of suggestion,lexical features,syntactic features and pragmatic strategies is made.In the last Chapter,conclusions are made,followed by the limitation of this study and suggestion for future research.