Abstract:
This research presents a pragmatic and discourse analysis of advice giving in Thai. The aims are two-fold: 1) to investigate strategies and discourse structures of two types of advice giving, i.e., solicited and unsolicited advice, and 2) to compare the strategies and discourse structures of these two kinds of advice givings. The data are drawn from radio call-in advice program and free conversations between friends. The strategies and discourse structures employed in advice giving are analyzed according to Jiang's (2006) and Abe's (2001) respectively. It is found that there are two mains strategies- direct and indirect- employed in both solicited and unsolicited advice. Sometimes the advice giver suggests explicitly what and how the advice seeker should do to overcome their problem by using performative verbs and directive sentence, e.g., I recommend you to , Go to bed now. However, indirect strategies are mostly found in both types of advice giving. It shows that the advice giver tries to avoid face threatening act of the advice seeker by using indirect syntactic patterns such as conditional sentences and modals. In terms of discourse structure, there are 7 similar components in both advice giving types: disclosure of the problem, clarification of the problem, proposal of the advice, refusal of the advice, negotiation that makes advice accepted, acceptance of the advice and moral support, which is characteristic of Asian languages. Reprehension of the advice seeker is the component that found only in the unsolicited advice context because the relationship between both interlocutors is intimate, on the other hand, in the solicited context, the interlocutors had never known each other so that the advice giver tries not to do a face threatening act