基于言语行为理论的英语专业四级听力理解测试探究
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安徽财经大学外国语学院英语系毕业论文
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Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Rationale
Speech act theory is an important theory in the pragmatic study of language. It was
originated with the British philosopher J. L. Austin in the late 50’s of the 20th
century. According to his model, a speaker might be performing three acts
simultaneously when speaking: locutionary act, illocutionary act, and perlocutionary
act. A locutionary act is the act of uttering words, phrases, clauses. It is the act of
conveying literal meaning by means of syntax, lexicon and phonology. An
illocutionary act is the act of expressing the speakers’ intention; it is the act
performed in saying something. A perlocutionary act is the act performed by or
resulting from saying something. However, what speech act theory is most
concerned with is the illocutionary act which attempts to explain the ways by which
the speaker can mean more than what they say. And speech act theory, as one of the
most important research subjects in pragmatics, provides the rationale for how to
intake and apprehend the conversations under certain circumstances. It is, therefore,
of great significance to the listening comprehension in TEM4. As is known to us all
that the listening comprehension in TEM4 is a complex mixture and involves
various aspects, and each listening aspect involved is often regulated or directed by
certain rules. Speech act theory is the very one of them, and it may well serve as a
gateway to help students of English majors to grasp the denominator overtones of
speakers, so much so that students can fully and absolutely understand what the
speaker intends to mean, and then promptly find out the right answer to the question
given. Based on the framework of speech act theory, this paper is mainly an attempt
to analyze and interpret the listening comprehension in TEM4 in order to improve
the language competence of English majors by the application of the theory. The 安徽财经大学外国语学院英语系毕业论文
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paper begins with an introduction of listening comprehension in TEM4 with its
current situations, its roles and significance in English learning. Then it puts forward
the idea of “listening comprehension in TEM4 as a demanding skill”, and afterward
through the presentation of J. L. Austin’s speech act theory, Searle’s five
classifications of speech acts together with the method of detailed analysis, it
highlights the fact that speech act theory plays a very important role in the
apprehending of English listening. Furthermore, the paper employs many a concrete
and representative example from the listening comprehension in TEM4 to bring out
the point that English majors of grade four can truly improve a lot in their listening
comprehension section by the further study and apt application of the speech act
theory. So long as they can intake the very message they have just heard, they can
find the right answer to the question given as quickly as possible.
1.2 Literature Review
The listening comprehension is an indispensable section of TEM4, yet for many
students it is not an easy task to cope with, especially for the English majors who are
required to have a pretty good command of it. Speech act theory, however, as an
important theory in the pragmatic study of language, may well serve as a bridge
from which listeners can get access to the denominator overtones of the speaker and
comprehend what the speaker truly intends to mean. Hence, this field is well worth
our studying.
As J. L. Austin (1975) states in his book How to Do Things with Words that a
speaker might be performing three kinds of acts simultaneously when speaking:
locutionary act, illocutionary act, and perlocutionary act. This is the very basic
theory of speech acts, which is also the rationale of the whole thesis. 安徽财经大学外国语学院英语系毕业论文
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As Dai Weidong (戴炜栋 2002:7) concludes in his book A New Concise Course on
Linguistics for Students of English, Speech Act Theory that speech act theory
provides great philosophical insight into the nature of linguistic communication. In
the light of this theory, when we are speaking a language, we are doing something,
or in other words performing acts; and the process of linguistic communication
consists of a sequence of acts.
Searle (2002) points out in his book Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory
of Speech Acts that the simplest cases of meaning are those in which the speaker
utters a sentence and means exactly and literally what he says. In such cases the
speaker intends to produce a certain illocutionary effect in the hearer, and he intends
to produce this effect by getting the hearer to recognize this intention in virtue of the
