The Study Of Pragmatic Transfer In Chinese Non-English Majors'English Writing

Language transfer is an important field of study in Second Language Acquisition (SLA). It occurs at all levels of language learning from phonetics, lexis and syntax to discourse. As Long and Richards put it in the preface of Odlin's Language Transfer (1989): Language transfer has been a central issue in applied linguistics, second language acquisition, and language teaching for at least a century. Learners'interlanguage (IL) system reveals both their Native Language (NL) features and the features of the Target Language (TL), indicating an obvious interference from the learner's NL into the TL. Researchers have made comprehensive studies on the nature of transfer and its role in second language acquisition. But so far much has been done on transfer at the structural or cross-linguistic level, and the nonstructural or cross- cultural factors influencing the learner's second language performance, i.e., pragmatic transfer have received little attention. Pragmatic transfer refers to'the influence of learners'native language and culture on their IL pragmatic knowledge and performance'(Kasper, G. & Blum-Kulka 1993). Lack or misuse of TL pragmatic knowledge (pragmalinguistic or socio-pragmatic) in TL situations may result in violations of TL cultural norms, and lead to pragmatic failures in cross-cultural communication. However, research efforts have been mainly focused on cross-cultural oral communication situations such as requests, apologies and refusals, etc. while second language learners'pragmatic competence in writing, that is, learners'ESL written communicative performance, has been largely ignored. Traditionally, pragmatic theories and principles are mainly used to analyze spoken corpora, but it is appropriate to say that they can be equally applied to written language as well, because writing is a culture-embedded activity which is exactly what pragmatics aims to investigate. Therefore it is vital for us to balance our research attention to these two subfields.The aim of this paper is to investigate how pragmatic transfer affects Chinese students'ESL writing, i.e., to examine the various manifestations of transfer of the NL thought and cultural patterns in the TL writing, and then find out their causes. The corpus comes from the 30 English compositions written by the junior students majoring in World History at Shandong Normal University. With theories of pragmatics, English writing and language transfer, and from a socio-cultural perspective, the thesis makes a thorough analysis into the various manifestations of pragmatic transfer at lexical, syntactical/grammatical, and discourse levels, and points out that pragmatic transfer is universal in L2 writing and it is both a linguistic and cultural phenomenon, affecting the development of students'cross-cultural communication competence.Limitations of the thesis are obvious. They are small size of data, singular academic background of the subjects and a static approach to the research. Nevertheless, What I hope is to draw more research attention to this field, and that studies in the future shall be dynamic in methodology, large in scale and various in subjects'backgrounds.