A Study Of The Influencing Factors On Chinese Thanking Response Strategies

Thanking response is one of the most important speech acts in people’s daily communication.Its main function is to reduce the "indebtedness" of the thanker,and it plays a crucial role in maintaining good interpersonal relationships between interlocutors.Thanking response is usually realized by brief and formulaic expressions.This feature makes it particularly suitable for systematic in-depth analysis.The study on thanking response is not only significant for discovering the rules encoded in this speech act,but also for revealing the cultural values within one speech community.Social factors,for instance,gender,age and social distance,have been proved to have an effect on the choice of thanking and thanking response strategies.However,few systematic studies have focused on the impact of social factors on Chinese thanking response,and the existing research has drawbacks in terms of control of variables.The reliability of the results is hard to guarantee.In addition,the influence of education,complexity of thanking expressions and the degree of indebtedness on Chinese thanking response has not been studied.Study on the influence of these variables on Chinese thanking response helps us to discover the rules of use of this speech act and understand the cultural values of Chinese speech community.The current study aims to investigate the impact of four social variables on Chinese thanking response strategies.They are education,age.the complexity of thanking expressions and the degree of indebtedness.The experiment "asking strangers for directions" has been proved effective to collect thanking response.The study adopts this experiment to collect data.The participants’ educational background,age and gender are collected through a questionnaire.In order to reveal the specific effect of each variable,the study groups participants according to the different combinations of the 4 variables.Other variables are rigorously controlled to be consistent when the impact of one variable is examined.Finally,960 occurrences of thanking responses from 16 groups are collected.Based on the features of the data collected in the current research,the study employs a revised nine-category taxonomy of Bieswanger(2015)to code and analyze the data.The results indicate that:1)Education plays a role in determining the selection of Chinese thanking response strategies.2)Age affects the choice of Chinese thanking response strategies.3)The complexity of thanking expressions slightly influence the selection ofChinese thanking response strategies.Its impact on young participants is greater than that on the aged.4)Indebtedness of the thanker affects the selection of Chinese thanking response strategies.