ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE | June 30, 2019
Speech Act Theory and Its Application in the Titles of Articles in WeChat
Hongping Chen, Shasha Zhang
Page no 75-78 |
10.21276/sijll.2019.2.4.1
Language is an important semiotic system. The nature of interaction is the communication and exchanges of information.
Speech act refers to the fact that people use language to do something. Speech act theory originated with the British
philosopher John Austin. Researches on speech act start with the study on the functions of language in daily life. Until
now so many scholars conduct researches on the daily language based on speech act theory. With the development of
mass media, people tend to use Internet more and more frequently. As a result, the Internet becomes an important part in
people’s daily life. People use the Internet to learn, to socialize and to have fun. Media discourse is a complex system
which consists of diverse categories. Nowadays, WeChat as a kind of mass media is popular. This article will conduct a
research on the titles of articles in WeChat based on the speech act theory. Meanwhile, some feasible suggestions on how
to write a good title are put forward.
REVIEW ARTICLE | June 30, 2019
Comparative Analysis of Thematic Progression Patterns in Narration and Exposition
Hongping Chen, Yameng Zheng
Page no 79-84 |
10.21276/sijll.2019.2.4.2
It is assumed that thematic progression (TP) patterns are correlated with genres including narration, exposition,
description and argumentation. In order to figure out the distributions of TP patterns in narration and exposition, the
present study conducts a comparative study. It adopts four TP patterns: continuous pattern, TP with continuous Theme,
TP with continuous Rheme and alternative pattern. Two texts are chosen randomly from New Horizon English Course
(Reading and Writing) [1], a textbook for non-English majors in China, as representatives of narrative and expository
writings. This paper can be divided into five parts. First, this paper presents the background of this study. Then it
introduces the theoretical framework involving thematic structure and different thematic progression patterns. As the
main body, the third part focuses on the quantitative comparative analysis of distributions of TP patterns in the two
genres. The fourth part is results and discussion and the final part is conclusion. The result shows that though both genres
incline to utilize TP with continuous Theme and continuous pattern, narration prefers TP with continuous Rheme while
exposition tends to utilize more alternative pattern. This paper testifies the statement that there exist differences between
distributions of TP pattern in narrative and expository writing. It also attempts to provide enlightenments for guiding the
teachers to help improve students’ reading and writing abilities.