The key to intercultural communication: A comparative study of speech act realization of sympathy/empathy

Feelings of sympathy/empathy are an important part of human life. Sooner or later, everybody experiences problems and/or depression. On such occasions, emotional support from others helps people with problems to reduce or even overcome their psychological pain.; However, the ways in which people express their thoughts are different cross-culturally. This is evidenced in many different types of speech act studies such as apology, request, and compliments. The cross cultural differences of expressions in some cases can lead to dire misunderstandings between people from different cultures. Too many words or too few words of sympathetic expressions can fail the speaker's good intentions and cause misinterpretation on the listener's side.; This dissertation examined the speech act of sympathy/empathy produced by (a) American college students, (b) Japanese EFL students, and (c) Japanese college students whose majors are not English. The focus of this study was to investigate the amount of words used to express sympathy/empathy, the pragmatic competence of EFL students, and American students' perception of atypical speech acts produced by EFL students. The author also investigated how the status of the hearer and the severity of problems affected the amount of words produced by three groups through the participants' self-assessment test and the open discourse completion test.; The author developed the instrument, “The Sympathy/Empathy Discourse Assessment,” consisting of three sections: the open discourse completion test to investigate the speech act strategies, and a self-assessment section to investigate the quantity of the words and the degree of severity of the problems in each situation. The instrument used 14 situations, which described simulated problematic situations that elicited expressions of sympathy/empathy from the respondents. In constructing each item, two different types of status were used: a status equal and a status lower to higher. Also, the different levels of severity of the problems were considered. The perception test was constructed based on the responses from the EFL group and administered to the American group. This test examined American students' perception toward atypical sympathetic/empathetic expressions produced by the EFL students in Japan in order to investigate whether these expressions, including the use of silence, would lead to miscommunication between the speakers from different cultures.; Sixty-eight non-English major Japanese students in Japan, sixty-four EFL students, and seventy-three American students in the U.S. participated in the study. The results of the discourse completion section were categorized by strategies. Four native speakers of English worked as judges to establish inter-rater reliability.; The results of both the self-assessment and open discourse completion test indicated that Americans tended to talk more when the severity of the problems was high and less when the problems were mild. On the contrary, Japanese tended to speak less when the problems were serious, and more when the problem was mild. As for the EFL group, the self-assessment test indicated that they perceived themselves like Americans as producing more words when the problems were serious; however, the results obtained from the open discourse completion test indicated that like Japanese, they produced fewer words when the problems were serious. All groups showed a tendency to produce fewer words to a person with a higher status, and more to a person with the same status.; American students perceived some of the atypical expressions, including the use of silence, produced by EFL students to be problematic and to cause misunderstanding.