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the related studies on interactionaloverinformativeness abroad and at home. Chapter Two falls into four sections includingthe current section. Section 2.2 is devoted to introduce the previous studies abroad withregard to interactional overinformativeness from the initiator’s and the responder’sperspective respectively. Section 2.3 exclusively introduces the related studies on thephenomenon of IO at home. As we are going to see, numerable studies on thisphenomenon have been made by some scholars with different academic backgroundfrom different perspectives. A lot of contributions have been made with continuousefforts, while some unsolved or untouched problems still remain. Therefore, section 2.4concludes with some comments on the previous studies from two viewpoints,achievements and limitations, which can provide a unified perspective for the presentstudy.
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2.2 Previous Studies on Overinformativeness Abroad
So far, the existing research on interactional overinformativeness consists of twocategories. One is the research of overinformativeness from the perspective of theinitiator and the other is from the angle of the responder.The Ferrara’s study on interactional overinformativeness is related to sequences ofspeech act. From the perspective of speech act theory, Ferrara (1980) holds that thespeaker may provide over one speech act within a single turn-taking. A coherentconversation is constructed by interrelated speech acts. Consider the following example(Ferrara, 1980b):The two speech acts listed as above could be performed by just one single speakerwithin the same turn-taking in natural conversation. The speech acts in example (2)might happen in a church where interlocutors talk loudly. In accordance with Ferrara’sanalysis (1980b), the above two speech acts of the pair are not located “at the samelevel”, but are actually hierarchically ranked. The a-utterance and the b-utterance areinterrelated with different importance. One is the main speech act, while the other issubordinate to this main speech act. The a-utterance can be understood as the reason forthe command issued by the b-utterance which serves as the main speech act here. Theterm “embedded speech acts” is used by Ferrara to refer to this kind of subordinatespeech act. The embedded speech acts do not occur randomly and could not beinterpreted literally in terms of their functional relations with the main speech acts. Infact, the subordinate speech act can help achieve the success of the main speech act inconversation. Therefore, in uttering a sequence of speech acts, the interlocutor musthold in mind an intentional construct. Thus, the subordinate speech act will beunnecessary or even redundant if it is not interrelated with goals or intentions implied orexplicated in the main speech act.
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Chapter Three THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK....15
3.1 Conversational Implicature Theory...........15
3.1.1 Cooperative Principle....16
3.1.2 Relevance Theory..........18
3.2 Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory.....22
Chapter Four PRAGMATC ANALYSIS OF INTERACTIONALOVERINFORMATIVENESS........... 29
4.1 Definition and Classification of Interactional Overinformativeness......29
4.1.1 Definition of Interactional Overinformativeness........ 29
4.1.2 Classification of Interactional Overinformativeness............30
4.2 Functions of Interactional Overinformativeness.........31