Redressive Strategies And SA Sequence In Persuasion In English And Chinese:a Contrastive Analysis

Over the past four decades,there has been an increasing interest in politeness research in pragmatics,in which Brown and Levinson‘s Face-saving Theory and Blum-Kulka,House,and Kasper‘s CCSARP(Requests and Apologies: A Cross-Cultural Study of Speech Act Realization Patterns)are of far-reaching influence and provide paradigms for later research in this area,particularly for the cross-linguistic studies of FTAs.Against the background,this dissertation reports on a contrastive analysis of Redressive Strtegies and Speech Act Sequence in persuasion between English and Chinese;as persuasion,an inherently face-threatening speech act,has not been investigated with an in-depth exploration from a cross-linguistic perspective,and Redressive Strtegies and Speech Act Sequence are suitable for analyzing this kind of FTAs pragmatically and semantically.It is known that Speaker usually takes some redressive action when he attempts to perform FTAs to attenuate potential face threats;and Reddressive Strategies in Brown and Levinson‘s Face-saving Theory is feasible to analyze and explain persuasion;thus Redressive Strategies is exploited to analyze how Speaker makes use of Redressive Strategies while carrying out persuasion pragmatically.In order to achieve a relatively comprehensive investigation,Blum-Kulka,House,and Kasper‘s Speech Act sequence(SA sequence)is adopted to examine the semantic formation in persuasion.Therefore,the analytical framework is a combination of Redressive Strategies and SA sequence,the former analyzing linguistic strategies used in persuasion pragmatically,and the latter accounting for how Speaker frames this kind of speech act semantically.Besides,qualitative and quantitative methods are used in this dissertation,which takes Excel and SPSS 19.0 as supplementary instruments.In addition,the dissertation has been done based on a self-built English-Chinese comparable database extracted from texts of contemporary television dramas.Based on a detailed analysis of the English-Chinese database,the following aspects can be concluded:(1)As for Redressive Strategies in persuasion,it is shown there are three kinds of Redressive Strategies(Positive Politeness,Negative Politeness,and Off Record)and 25 types of linguistic devices to realize these Redressive Strategies in the English data.It is similar to that in the Chinese data.In specific,there are 13 types for Positive Politeness,6 types for Negative Politeness,and 6 types for Off Record in English;in contrast,there exist 12 types for Positive Politeness,5types for Negative Politeness,and 8types for Off Record in Chinese.It is indicated that the three kinds of Redressive Strategies and a vast majority of the linguistic devices for realizing them occur both in the English and Chinese data.The similarity between English and Chinese verifies the universality of Brown and Levinson‘s theory on FTAs cross-culturally.Besides,Redressive Strategies also possess its specialty in particular kinds of FTAs,which influence the occurrence of types of linguistic devices for realizing Redressive Strategies in the context of persuasion;in other words,the occurrence of the linguistic devices in the two languages are due to the nature of persuasion and pragmatic functions of different kinds of Redressive Strategies.(2)The overall frequencies of three kinds Redressive Strategies in English are arranged as follows: Negative Politeness(54.98%),Positive Politeness(39.85 %),and Off Record(5.17 %);while the frequencies of Redressive Strategies in Chinese are listed: Negative Politeness(48.48%),Positive Politeness(41.82 %),and Off Record(9.70 %).It is shown that the distributions of Redressive Strategies in English and Chinese are similar to each other;the occurrence frequency of Negative Politeness is the highest,followed by that of Positive Politeness and that of Off Record.Furthermore,in English Speaker has significant preference for NP-Strategy 2(43.54%),relative preference for PP-Strategy 6(9.96%),PP-Strategy 13(9.96%),PP-Strategy 7(5.54%),PP-Strategy 4(4.80%),and NP-Strategy 5(3.70%);and the rest 19 types are distributed sporadically.In Chinese,Speaker is inclined to use NP-Strategy 2(37.57%)and PP-Strategy13(22.42%);Speaker relatively prefers to exploit NP-Strategy 7(4.54%),PP-Strategy 7(4.24%),NP-Strategy 6(3.64%),PP-Strategy 11(3.64%),PP-Strategy10(3.64%),and OR-Strategy 13(3.33%);and the rest 17 types are of scattered distribution.Apart from the nature of persuasion and the pragmatic functions of Redressive Strategies,the distributions of Redressive Strategies in English are correlated significantly with the variables in the relative power,but nonsignificantly correlated with the variables in the social distance and those in the absolute ranking of impositions in the particular culture;the distributions in Chinese are correlated significantly with the factors in the absolute ranking of impositions in the particular culture,but nonsignificantly correlated with the variables in the social distance and those in the relative power.(3)With respect to SA sequence,there is also many a similarity between the two languages.There exist 5 situations in which SA sequence is framed and 8 specific types of SA sequence in English,in contrast there exist 6 situations and 11 specific types in Chinese,namely,there are S,A&S,A&H,H&S and A&H&S in which SA sequence is framed in two languages,and there exists an extra situation in Chinese where SA sequence is constituted only by Head act.There are 8 specific types of SA sequence,namely,A+H type,S type,A+S type,H+S type,S+H type,S+H+S type,A+H+S type,and A+S+H type both in English and in Chinese,but H type,H+S+H type,and A+S+H+S type only occur in Chinese.The similarity indicates a cross-linguistic universality in SA sequence proposed by Blum-Kulka,House,and Kasper,and it is the universality accounting for the common aspects in SA sequence formation between the two languages.The slight complexity in SA sequence in Chinese results from Chinese speakers‘ being slightly inclined to use direct way in constructing SA sequence in persuasion.In addition,it is revealed that none of Alerter,Head act,and Supportive move is a compulsory part in framing SA sequence in persuasion in English and in Chinese.As an optional component in SA sequence,Supportive move is of the biggest selective advantage to be chosen to form SA sequence in the context persuasion in the two languages,which is followed by Head act and Alerter,according to their frequencies,their positions,and functions in the data.It is their roles in forming SA sequence and the nature of persuasion that determine their selective advantage in framing SA sequence.(4)Concerning the distribution of SA sequence in the two languages,they are listed according to the situations in which SA sequence is framed as follows,A&S(39.85%),S(35.06%),H&S(12.17%),A&H&S(11.81%),and A&H(1.11%)in English,and S(39.09%),H&S(26.97%),A&H&S(14.85%),A&S(13.94%),A&H(3.03%),and H(2.12%)in Chinese.It is shown that the situation where SA sequence is constructed primarily by Supportive Move is of highest frequency,followed by the situation in which Head Act and Supportive Move are primary components,and by the situation in which SA sequence is framed primarily by Head Act both in English and in Chinese.To be more specific,Speaker significantly prefers to use A+S type(39.85%)and S type(35.06%),relatively prefers A+H+S type(7.75%),H+S type(7.01%),and A+S+H type(4.06%),and does not prefer S+H type(2.58%),S+H+S type(2.58%),and A+H type(1.11%)in English;in contrast Speaker is inclined to exploit S type(39.09%)prominently;he relatively prefers 5 types,namely,H+S type(16.97%),A+S type(13.94%),A+H+S type(9.09%),S+H type(8.48%),and A+S+H type(4.24%),and does not show preference for the rest 5 types in Chinese.The nature of persuasion and the semantic roles of SA sequence components influence the distribution of SA sequence in persuasion in the two languages.Moreover,the distribution of SA sequence in English are nonsignificantly correlated with the variables in the social distance,and those in the relative power and the absolute ranking of impositions in the particular culture;the distributions in Chinese are due to significant correlation with the factors in the absolute ranking of impositions in the particular culture,but nonsignificant correlation with those in the social distance and the relative power.