英语论文网

Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Background of the Study
Speech actsare realized differently across different social and cultural norms. Besides, theperformance modes reflect to a certain degree the social and national characters of anethnic group. Because the study of speech acts seems like to be vital to theunderstanding of the communicative and behavioral manner of certain languagecommunity, lots of efforts have been made to research the realization of certainspeech acts and the underlying social and cultural values that affect people’s choice ofstrategies in performing the speech acts.Inquiry is one of the most basic language phenomena, which is also an importantsubject in the study of linguistics. In daily life, people often get information, verifyinformation and provide suggestion by performing the speech act of “inquiry”.
.........

1.2 Purpose of the Study
This thesis aims to investigate the realization of service staff’s response tocustomers’ inquiry speech act from a socio-pragmatic perspective, try to enrich thepragmatic studies of Dunhuang and Lanzhou and attempt to research the effects of gender difference and politeness degree on the strategies employed by service staffsof Dunhuang. Furthermore, this thesis intends to find the similarities and differencesbetween the service staff’s response strategies adopted in Dunhuang and Lanzhou.
........

1.3 Significance of the Study
From the theoretical sense, this thesis attempts to enrich the pragmatic studies ofinquiry speech act. There are numerous researches abroad on inquiry- response speechact from pragmatic perspective according to the previous studies which involves inone single given language or in multi-language background. However, there are littlestudies at home about speech act from pragmatic perspective. The previous research athome in the pragmatic studies of speech act is made on the speech acts of compliment,invitation and apology. In order to further study the pragmatic features of speech acts,I try to investigate the inquiry, which is a common speech act but has not yet beenstudied. Besides the above-mentioned pragmatic studies, which are implementedagainst the background of pragmatics, specifically, against the theory of speech act,this thesis aims to probe into the inquiry from a service perspective and focuses onpoliteness and strategies use in inquiry. From the previous studies on politeness inservice discourse, little research has investigated inquiry and response act. Therefore,this thesis aims to explore the effects of social variables on the choices of politenessstrategies. This study tries to examine the social variables of gender and politenessdegree. Besides, by comparing the service staff’s response strategies in Dunhuang andLanzhou, this thesis analyses their respective response patterns, which would contribute to the development of variational pragmatics.In addition, this thesis has its practical significance. During the research, lots ofauthentic and natural dialogue materials between service staffs and customers arecollected both from Lanzhou and Dunhuang which would be the precious data forlocal government to know clearly about the politeness condition and they could putout better and feasible suggestions to develop local service industry.
.........

Chapter Two Theoretical Background

2.1 Speech Act Theory
Austin is the famous mode