A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And English Comfort Speech Acts From A Multimodal Perspective

From a multimodal perspective,this paper takes comfort speech acts as the research object,and compares the differences between verbal and nonverbal behaviors and analysis the influencing factors of comfort situations common in daily life in China and the United States.Based on the comfort segments of two family dramas in China and the United States,ELAN was used to mark the speech acts in real situations,so as to understand the differences of comfort speech acts in different topic situations,and provide reference for Chinese learners in Chinese learning,intercultural communication and teaching Chinese as a foreign language.Comfort is a kind of common speech communication behavior,which means that the consoler tries to relieve or eliminate the negative emotion of the other side by performing the comforting speech act.Based on speech act theory and multimodal discourse analysis theory,this paper uses literature research,qualitative and quantitative analysis methods to try to answer three questions: First,how to establish a framework for studying comfort speech acts with reference to the existing multimodal discourse analysis theory and how to implement it?Secondly,from the perspective of multimodal,are there differences between Chinese and English comfort speech acts in verbal and non-verbal modes? What are the differences and what are the factors that contribute to the difference?Third,how to apply the conclusions to the intercultural communication of Chinese learners and the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language.Based on the problem to be studied,this research is divided into five parts.The first part discusses the research background,research significance,research methods and theoretical basis.The second part reviews the research on comfort speech act and multimodal discourse,and defines the research on comfort speech act and multimodal discourse.The third part is the research design of the paper,which first collects and classifies the comfort speech acts in two Chinese and American dramas,then transplants the corpus and annotates the video,and finally analyzes the extracted data.The fourth part is the empirical analysis of the paper,comparing the differences of language modes from language characteristics and speech strategies.The differences in nonverbal modes were analyzed in terms of facial expressions,gestures,and trunk and head movements.Finally,it is found that,on the one hand,Chinese comfort language is more beautiful and abundant,while English comfort language is more concise and plain.On the other hand,in the non-verbal features,the differences in facial expressions and head movements are the most prominent,and some specific expressions in gestures and trunk movements are also different.At the end of the thesis,the research conclusions are applied to teaching Chinese as a foreign language,and constructive suggestions for teaching Chinese as a foreign language are put forward from three aspects: classroom teaching,textbook compilation,and learning strategies.