会话含义与英语中的劝说语功能分析【文献综述】

毕业论文文献综述
英语
会话含义与英语中的劝说语功能分析
Literature Review for the Present Study
Herbert W. Simon defined persuasion as the art of communication which designed to
influence the autonomous judgments on others. It is a form of attempted influence in the sense
that it seeks to alter the way others think, feel, or act, but it differs from other forms of
influence. (Simon, H. W, 1986:7) Addressed as it is to autonomous, choice-making
individuals, persuasion disposes others but does not impose. It affects persuadee’s sense of
what is true or false, probable or improbable, as well as their evaluations of people, events,
ideas, or proposals. Persuasion is a part and parcel in occupations, such as politics, law, social
work, counseling, advertising, marketing, etc. In virtue of this and other reasons, it draws the
concern of various circles of scholars at home and abroad. Researchers from different spheres
have focused on different aspects of persuasion in line with their objective of study.
1． Research abroad
1.1 The rhetoric approach
Persuasion can be dated back to the ancient Greece, which has stood for centuries with
other branches of humanities such as politics, literature, law, and religious. Since Greek
philosopher Aristotle first systematized the study of persuasion，the technique of rhetoric has
been widely applied in different fields and the ranges of their study has been greatly
expanded. His treatise, Rhetoric, is regarded as “the most significant works on persuasion
ever written” and “the single most important works on the study of speechmaking” (Simon, H.
W, 1986:56). Traditional rhetoric is flourished in dealing with practical matters of persuasion
involved in politics, ethics, and sociology.
However, the traditional rhetoric has its shortcomings as it takes the language property
into consideration, while ignores the abundant material of the whole linguistic interaction in
concrete context. As one of the sub-linguistics, modern rhetoric stressed the effectiveness of
language and makes research on persuasion academically. It shed new light on the study of

persuasion and brings brand new perspective on the study of persuasion language from an
academic aspect. At the beginning of the 20th century, Saussure, the Swedish linguist,
proposed the theory of distinguishing “langue” and “Parole”, laid a foundation for modern
linguistics, and ushered rhetoric into a new world, thus opened up a route for the development
and formation of modern rhetoric. According to John McWhorter, contemporary rhetoric
employs the social, cultural and ethical aspects of persuasion, he holds that persuasion is an
interaction through symbolism to link the speaker with the receiver and recognizes that
persuasion is an act that involves social and cultural consequences. (John McWhorter,
2008:45) Contemporary principles of persuasion are derived largely from psychologists and
sociologists. They approach persuasion from a psychological and sociological point of view.
1.2 The psychological approach
Psychologists centers on the detailed exploration of how personal motivation influence
people’s reaction to other’s persuasion and seek to explain how their mentality, beliefs or
values are formed and how they are encouraged by given stimulate elements as well.
Scholars in this field, such as Maslow, argues that an individual is motivated by his inherent
needs and an unfulfilled need would be motivated which serve grounds for persuasion.
(Adrian Akmajian, 2001:65) Others argue that individuals has a built-in sense of cognitive
homeostasis or balance, so when persuasive stimuli creates imbalance, individuals will seek
to reacquire a state of balance by making specific and appropriate reaction to the persuasion.

1.3 The sociological approach
On the contrary, sociologists regard persuasion as a way of communication and pay
attention to the communication interaction in which people make their persuasive activity.
They focus on the interaction of the individual with others in persuasive situations. These
theories include social learning theory, functional theory and social judgment-involvement
theory. Social Learning theory emphasizes modeling as a way of gaining compliance,
functional theory holds that attitudes serve instrumental, ego defense, value expressive, and
knowledge functions. Social judgment involvement theory, however, holds that attitudes are
not fixed points but rather there are latitudes of acceptance. Sociologists provide new ways of
research to persuade people, while they simply take persuasion as a communication act and
put the language property aside. It fails to analyze the proposition and implicature of “what is

said”.

2. Research in China
Westerners have investigated persuasion in a considerable comprehensive way and have
harvested rich fruits. In china there are a good stock of books and articles on guiding and
training people to become persuasive and powerful speakers. And many of them adopt and
adapt western achievements. In addition, many concrete fields such as advertisement, law,
education, negotiation, politics, business, and so on are involved, especially the persuasion in
advertising and economy. Different scholars in domestic have launched research on
persuasion from various perspectives. Previous studies focus on the art and strategies of
persuasion and most researchers have dig into it from the angle of cross- culture
communication which includes how culture difference influence the chosen of persuasion
techniques and the results of the persuasion activity. With the introduction of pragmatics into
China, Chinese linguists put a new insight into language studies. A large number of speech
acts such as apologies, refusals and so on, have been studied well and received fruitful
achievements, however, besides persuasion. Tang Xia defines persuasion as a kind of speech
act and even more complex than other activities like order refusal and so on. Tang analyzes
persuasion with the employment of the speech act theory proposed by English linguists Austin.
She applies speech act theory to this study with a conception of persuasive act as a dynamic
communicative process.
3. The theory of Conversational Implicature in persuasion
Besides rhetoricians, psychologists and sociologists who have gone deeply and widely in
persuasion study and accomplished a lot, linguists applied pragmatics in persuasion research.
Pragmatics takes human factors into its consideration and therefore provides dynamic
approach to the study of linguistic phenomenon. Pragmatics, simply put, studies how
utterances have meaning on the context, or have communicative meaning under certain
conditions, including how the meaning is produced and comprehended, as well as studies
language appropriateness and tactfulness. It is closely related to persuasion and has
important contributions to the study of persuasion by extending the scope of persuasion
research, among which Grice’s Conversational Implicature is most outstanding.

3.1 Conversational implicature theory
Conversational Implicature was first proposed by Grice in 1976. It is the theory
concerning how people use language. It does not study the literal meaning of the utterance
from the internal system of language but explains the real meaning conveyed by the speaker
based on the context. It does not pay attention to what the speaker says but focus on what the
speaker intended to imply by saying the utterance.
As Grice says, a speaker sends more information than the literal meaning of words. It is
transferred not by encoding the utterance linguistically, but by providing evidence of the
intention the speaker intends to convey. Grice insists that the communicative activities of
human beings should be governed by norms and principles during hunting for the ways in
which such proposition is provided by the speaker. He makes it clear that the rationale
underling the conversational implicature theory in the assumption that rational
communication exchanges are characteristically, to some degree at least, cooperative efforts.
To some degree, when communicate with others, a common purpose or a mutually accepted
direction is recognized in the each participant. Therefore, a listener must go beyond the
semantic meaning of words to infer what the speaker intended to convey in order to really
understand the meaning of an utterance, which requires the speaker should intend to
communicate and the listener recognize that intention and be willing to cooperate with the
speaker. That is to say, the speaker and hearer are presumed to observe certain rational
principles of communication. The core of such communicative principles is cooperativeness.
Grice calls it the cooperative principles. As he points out, if someone cares about the goals or
directions set by the participant in a conversation, he will be expected to have an interest in
the matter and participate in the further actions. This common interest in a communication is
very important. It’s significant for persuaders to comply with this principle. Grice identifies
the principles into four basic maxims of conversation. These maxims are expressed as
follows:
3.2 Four maxims of the Cooperative Principle
The maxims of quality
The maxim of quality is concerned with the amount of information to be provided by an
utterance, and under it fall the following maxims:
1) Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purpose of the

exchange.
2) Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
The maxims of quality
The maxim of quality is concerned with truth telling, and has two parts:
1) Do not say what you believed to be false.
2) Do not say which you lack adequate evidence
Under the category of Qulaity falls a super---maxim--- “ Try to make your conversation
contribution one that is true”. According to Grice, if someone flouts this maxim, then he
or she is telling a lie.
The maxims of relation
The maxim is very simple：
Be relevant.
This maxim can be interpreted as make sure what you say is relevant to the conversation
in the communication situation in which you are involved in. The point of this maxim is that
it is not sufficient for a statement to be true for it to constitute an acceptable conversational
contribution.
The maxim of manner
Grice included the super-maxim ---“Be perspicuous”---and four components as:
1) Avoid obscurity of expression.
2) Avoid ambiguity.
3) Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).
4) Be orderly.
(Hu Zhuanglin 2006:191)
In short, these maxims specify what participants have to do in order to converse in a
maximally efficient, rational, co-operative way: when express oneself speakers should speak
sincerely, relevantly and clearly, while providing sufficient information.
Grice’s exploration of conversation implicature suggests that the rules which holds good
for conversation may also apply to deliberate communicative process, namely persuasion.
The goal of persuasion may be to improve the state of the persuadee, or partly or primarily to
change others’ attitude or behavior. No matter what intention it is, it’s difficult for persuader
to succeed in encouraging receiver to change their original attitude, belief, decision or