（外国语言学及应用语言学专业论文）托福听力理解中间接语言的语用研究.pdf

iv 摘 要 间接使用语言是人类语言交际中的一个普遍现象语言的间接性是指在 语言实践中人们并非总是直截了当地表明说话者的意图或为了获取特定 的交际效果故意省去笔墨把信息藏于字里行间出现语言符号和符号实 际所承载或传递的信息之间的差异从而给听话者理解说话者的真实意图设 置了交际障碍和陷阱因此间接语言对听力理解的障碍研究重要而又有价 值国内外不少学者就听力理解中的间接现象从不同角度进行了大量的探索 与研究但这些相关研究都只对其做出定性的解释缺乏系统的数据和定量 的分析以前针对此现象的研究或只注重片面缺乏完整性或只做出定性 分析缺少定量的数据基础 本论文结合交际理论从语用学角度通过言语行为理论和会话含 意理论 这两个解释机制 对 1050 个托福听力理解的真实语料进行定量分析 结果发现隐含和推导言外之意在听力理解语料中占有很大比例而且言语-功 能策略的选择和直间接表意之间存在相对性在此基础上文章进一步分 析了导致会话含意产生的语言感情意义手段和信息又可细分为词汇手 段句式手段逻辑-语义信息和其它两方面的因素 本文致力于帮助和指导对学生听力理解的训练和测试并为课堂教学如 何提高学生的听力理解能力提供了有益的参考同时还希望本文的研究能 引起研究者对这一语言现象的更多关注并开展更进一步的深入研究 关键词托福听力理解 交际理论 言语行为 会话含意 ii abstract since the indirect conveyance of functional meaning nowadays appears to be a universally spread phenomenonhow to “listen to” the indirect utterances appears to be one of the most crucial barriers that influences students listening practice. listening comprehension still remains the most bothering and most difficult task for the majority of students in some colleges and universities nationwide. since 1960s, both domestic and international scholars have devoted greatly to enormous explorations on how to remove the barriers to listening to indirect languages. however, all the relevant researches only provide some qualitative explanations; they lack systematic statistics and quantitative analysis on the indirect language in listening comprehension, along with the specific suggestions to the learning and teaching of listening comprehension. this thesis, therefore, exerts to investigate the major means that determine the indirect barriers in listening comprehension by analyzing 1050 short conversations in the tested toefl listening materials, and then presents the suggestions we can get to help students improve their listening comprehension and communicative skills. for the development of this thesis, the theoretical basis is founded on three major theories: communication theory, speech act theory and conversational implicature theory. communication theory interprets the communicative process and communicative basis in listening comprehension, whereas speech act and conversational implicature present the pragmatic criteria to classify and explain the indirect utterances in listening comprehension. the results show that the indirect utterances in listening comprehension can be divided into two groups: emotional group and informative group. the criterion of classification lies in two major means concerned with the setting of indirect meaning in listening comprehension: features of spoken utterances and informative discrepancy between words and meanings. the former, from the features of spoken language, involves iii different emotive feelings in peoples utterances with the special colloquial expression forms and the supplementary aids of various phonetic means. however, the latter can be further categorized into four kinds of subways to set up an implicature, namely by lexical features, syntactic patterns, logic information and other means. these results will shed light on the teaching and testing of students listening comprehension. key words: toefl listening comprehension communication theory speech acts conversational implicature 独创性声明 本人声明所呈交的学位论文是我个人在导师指导下进行的研究工作及取得的研 究成果尽我所知除文中已经标明引用的内容外本论文不包含任何其他个人或 集体已经发表或撰写过的研究成果对本文的研究做出贡献的个人和集体均已在 文中以明确方式标明本人完全意识到本声明的法律结果由本人承担 学位论文作者签名 日期 年 月 日 学位论文版权使用授权书 本学位论文作者完全了解学校有关保留使用学位论文的规定即学校有权 保留并向国家有关部门或机构送交论文的复印件和电子版允许论文被查阅和借阅 本人授权华中科技大学可以将本学位论文的全部或部分内容编入有关数据库进行检 索可以采用影印缩印或扫描等复制手段保存和汇编本学位论文 保密 在_年解密后适用本授权书 不保密 请在以上方框内打 学位论文作者签名 指导教师签名 日期 年 月 日 日期 年 月 本论文属于 1 introduction listening comprehension is not only one of the important language skills required to develop in our college foreign language teaching, but also plays an important role in second language learning. researchers (rivers 1981; morley 1991) estimate that we listen twice as much as we speak, four times as much as we read, and five times as much as we write, which demonstrates what an important role listening comprehension plays in foreign language learning and teaching. moreover, with the increase of oral communication between people from different countries, it also has practical significance in promoting the correct understanding between people. what is the nature of listening comprehension then? peoples views on the nature of listening comprehension have gone through many changes. during the period dominated by the theory of behaviorism, listening comprehension was traditionally considered as a kind of passive and static behavioristic stimulus, in which the listener resembles a tape-recorder whose main task while listening is simply to memorize what the speaker has said (hayes, ornstein rost 1990; omalley et al. 1989), the new concept on the nature of listening comprehension is presented to us. listening comprehension, according to o malley and chamot (1998) in their empirical study, “is an active and conscious process in which the listener constructs meaning by using cues from contextual information and existing knowledge, while relying upon multiple strategic resources to fulfill the task requirement” (1998: 434). they found that the active processing and the use of strategies were involved in every stage of comprehension. vandergrift (1999) also held the same view. he stated in detail, “listening comprehension is a complex, active process, in which the listener must discriminate between sounds, understand vocabulary and grammatical structures, interpret stress and intonation, retain what was gathered in all of the above, and interpret it within the immediate as well as the larger social structural context of the utterance. coordinating all of this involved a great deal of mental activity on the part of the listener ”(1999: 168). therefore, listening comprehension is considered as an active and dynamic process of listening (paying attention to utterances) and comprehending (trying to interpret the indirect pragmatic meaning from something we hear). how to “listen to” the indirect utterances appears to be one of the most crucial barriers that influences students listening comprehension. since the indirect conveyance of meaning nowadays is a universally spread phenomenon of human communication, implicature, a deeply concerned problem in the field both of pragmatics and listening comprehension, is put forward in the efl (english as a foreign language) teaching of speaking and listening class. to listen successfully to spoken language, listeners need to be able to work out what speakers actually mean when they use particular words in particular ways on particular occasions, such as to understand speakers intentions, to differentiate speech act meaning, to evaluate the intensity of speakers meanings, to recognize facetious behaviors and respond 3 appropriately, or so forth, rather than simply to understand the words themselves. since 1960s, both domestic and international scholars (austin 1962; searle 1969; grice 1975; levinson 1983; leech 1983; blumkulka 1989; he zhaoxiong 1984, 1989; he ziran 1987) have devoted greatly to enormous explorations on how to remove the barriers to listening to indirect languages. with their efforts, a new way has been carved out, which interprets languages in terms of behaviors and functions. however, all the relevant researches only provide some qualitative explanations; they lack systematic data and quantitative analysis on the indirect phenomena in listening comprehension, along with the specific suggestions on how to improve the learning and teaching of listening comprehension. this thesis, therefore, exerts to investigate the means that determine the indirect barriers in listening comprehension from both the spoken language features and pragmatic interpretations, and also presents the suggestions we can get to help students improve their listening comprehension and communicative skills. for the development of this thesis, the theoretical basis is founded on three major theories: communication theory, speech act theory and conversational implicature theory. communication theory interprets the communicative process and communicative basis in listening comprehension, whereas speech act and conversational implicature present the pragmatic criteria to classify and explain the indirect utterances in listening comprehension. the present thesis consists of six chapters. it starts with a brief introduction, giving a discussion on the nature of listening comprehension and the most crucial barriers to listening comprehension, that is, to listen to the indirect meaning in utterances. chapter two presents a careful review to the theories and previous researches related to studying the indirect language in listening comprehension. chapter three introduces the study methodology, which derives five main frequency tables by analyzing some tested toefl listening comprehension corpus. the core of this thesis is chapter four. it contains the table results and discussion on different means that determine the setting of direct or indirect meaning in conversations. the fifth chapter then generalizes some implications of this study and makes suggestions on how to improve the learning and teaching of listening comprehension. at last, chapter six brings a conclusion to this thesis. 4 1 a review of related literature as mentioned above, the development of this thesis is founded on three major theories: communication theory, speech act theory and conversational implicature theory. this chapter sets a theoretical basis to the study. it begins with a brief demonstration of the communicative basis to listening comprehension, for listening comprehension is actually a process to understand the communicative process among communicators. then it moves on to the pragmatic interpretations to listening barriers so as to pave the way for a detailed discussion of pragmatic criteria on how to classify and explain the indirect utterances in listening comprehension in the next chapters. 1.1 communication theory 1.1.1 definition of conversational communication according to the explanation given by richards (2000: 80), communication is a kind of social activity that needs more than two people to cooperate together. it is the exchange of ideas, information, etc. between two or more persons. in an act of communication there is usually at least one speaker or sender, a message that is transmitted, and a person or persons for whom this message is intended (the receiver). the forms of communication are diverse, including interpersonal communication, mass communication, cross-cultural communication, etc. conversational communication belongs to the interpersonal communication. the purpose of conversational communication is to convey messages and the function of messages could be to warn, to advise, to inform, to persuade, to express opinions or to amuse, etc. messages are always transferred in a particular situation and particular way. senders may convey something with explicit utterances, or otherwise express what they mean recessively. we call them overt or covert phenomena in languages. various tools and methods can be used in conversational communication, for example, 5 verbal communication and non-verbal communication. verbal communication is the most important communication method. under the grammatical rules, words construct sentences. as the sentences are spoken and used to express ones ideas, we call them “utterances”. if the utterances only produce a series of sentences, those kinds of utterances cannot be called “communication” even though they are well-constructed sentences. we can call them “communicative behaviors” when the utterances cause some reflections. the goal of communication is not only to exchange words with people who speak that language but also actually to understand what they mean. the choice of words is constrained by the context in which the language is used. constructing a speech event means not only having a choice of grammatical and lexical features, but also deciding which to choose from on ones assessment of the whole situation of communication and also on the expectations raised by the speakers and the listeners in that situation. linguistically speaking, the conversational communication is an act in which meanings are exchanged through signs. the act involves essentially two participants, i.e. sender and receiver and two processes, i.e. encoding and decoding information. 1.1.2 the factors in communication conversation is a cooperative achievement of at least two participants. a speech event can be analyzed into a number of components: addresser, addressee, message, channel, setting, topic and code (dai weidong et al. 1986: 124). addresser and addressee refer to the participants of the conversation. the participants can also be called the speaker and the hearer, the sender and receiver. all those pairs of words refer to the expression for the participants of communication. message in conversational communication is the content that each participant informs. channel refers to the means and behaviors used in communication, and in this thesis that is defined as the face-to-face communication. in our daily communication, the meaning of the participants can be influenced by the factors like prosodic features and paralinguistic features, such as intonation, sentence stress, rhythm, pitch, tone, face 6 expressing, and gesture. all of those can be used to help express speakers meaning. setting refers to the context of the conversation. topic refers to what is talked about or the intention of the communication. as one communicates with the other, there is no way in which one speaker can put an absolute constraint on what the next speaker will say. this does not mean, however, that one utterance can be followed by any other utterance in conversation (amy 2000: 19). code is the tool of communication, such as an exact language used. it must be pointed out that in face-to-face communication, the follow-up move is often realized by nonverbal means such as a nod, a smile, an eyebrow rising, and silence. for example: j wants to pay s for the stamps that s has given her. s: i think youd better just keep it because i dont have change anyway. j: well, next time im in the money as far as stamps are concerned. s: (laughs) s laugh is a contributing move in the conversational exchange. it is a non-verbal acknowledgement of js accepting her suggestion to just take the stamps for free. non-verbal gestures such as the above are often not recorded in transcriptions, giving the illusion that the follow-up move is absent (amy 2000: 37). sometimes silence is also significant and will be interpreted as meaningful in conversations. the meaning of communication may greatly relate with speakers social relation and social status. in society, everyone is surrounded by various relations, such as friends, husband and wife, compeers, etc. the different relations also influence the way, on which people communicate with each other. the same meaning can be expressed in different words and intonations according to the different relations between the speaker and the hearer. understanding an utterance is not only a problem the interlocutor faces, so is communicating in the conversation. before understanding the utterance, the interlocutor must get the cooperation of the other and keep the participant of both in order to reach the correct understanding of the messages. 7 1.1.3 the process of communication 1.1.3.1 encoding and decoding in communication by using language as a primary tool, one bridges his own thoughts with those of other people. the basic purpose of communication is to give and exchange information. this exchange can be divided into two processes: the encoding process and the decoding process. the encoding process is the first stage toward communication. it may be defined as the process of translating an already conceived idea into a message appropriate for transmission to a receiver. this stage can be subdivided into three steps: creation of the message, adaptation of the message to the intended receiver and transmission of the message to the receiver. the encoding process is based on the senders perception of the way the receiver will perceive messages. the decoding process refers to the stage that describes the receivers reflections when he or she gets the transmitted message of the sender. this stage can be subdivided into four steps: attention, interpretation, evaluation and response. attention means either hearing or seeing the message, or in some cases, both hearing and seeing it. interpretation refers to the act of the receiver in which he believes the sender meant by the message transmitted. it is generally supposed that the receiver makes a conscious attempt to interpret the message correctly. however, this does not mean that a correct interpretation will always result, but only that normally there is such an attempt on the part of the receiver. evaluation refers to the act that the receiver evaluates the message in terms of its meaning for himself when he has interpreted what he thinks the source meant by the message. response refers to the exact action that the receiver takes once the evaluation is completed. this response is, in some cases, an overt response, an act of behavior, or a covert response. anyway, a response is both overt and covert in many cases. communication is not such a single process as starting with the activity of speaking and ending up with the activity of listening; it is rather a complex process in which the speaker and the listener always change their roles. figure 1.1 is a demonstration