Compliment Response Strategies Of The Han Chinese And Uygur College Students: A Contrastive Analysis

This study is going to investigate pragmatic transfer in the speech act of compliment responding of the Uygur and Han Chinese students and to testify Giao's Pragmatic and Discourse Markedness Hypothesis (2002). Giao's theory proposes that pragmatic and discourse transfer is more likely to occur when the L1 language/culture is oriented to the denying strategies (less marked) in CRs, and the L2 language/culture shows a preference for the accepting strategies in CRs while pragmatic transfer is less likely to occur when the L1 language/culture is oriented to the accepting strategies (more marked) in CRs, and the L2 language/culture shows a preference for the denying strategies in CRs (2002). The testification of Giao's theory is divided into two predictions and two hypotheses in the study:Prediction 1: The Han Chinese culture is oriented to the denying strategies in CRs.Prediction 2: The Uygur culture is oriented to the accepting strategies in CRs.Hypothesis 1: The Han Chinese learners of Uygur language show the evidence of transfer from their L1 denying strategies in CRs to Uygur language.Hypothesis 2: The Uygur learners of Han Chinese do not show pragmatic transfer of their L1 accepting strategies in CRs to Han Chinese.The analysis of the data suggests that Giao's theory is applicable to Uygur and Han Chinese data. The findings are as the following:(1) 38.80% of the Han Chinese subjects prefer to accept the compliments they receive and 61.20% Han Chinese subjects tend to deny the compliments. This shows that the Han Chinese culture is oriented to the accepting strategies in responding to compliments(2) 70.98% of the Uygur subjects are reported to accept the compliments and 29.02% of the Uygur data choose to deny the compliments. Thisreveals that the Uygur culture is oriented to the accepting strategies in CRs.(3) When interviewed in Uygur, the Han Chinese subjects do not use the Uygur CR strategies to respond to the compliments given. They seem to still employ the denying strategies featured in the Han Chinese culture to respond to the compliments uttered in Uygur. Therefore, the Han Chinese learners transfer their L1 denying strategies to their L2 data of CRs.(4) When interviewed in Chinese, the Uygur subjects behave differently from when they speak Uygur. In the native Uygur data, the majority of the Uygur subjects choose the accepting strategies to respond to the compliments, but when they speak in their target language Chinese, they prefer to use the denying strategies like the native Han Chinese. It can be concluded that the Uygur learners do not transfer their L1 accepting strategies to their L2 data of CRs.In Giao's theory, the culture oriented to the accepting strategies in CRs on which his theory is based is only the American English culture. In order to investigate whether Giao's theory is applicable to other cultures which are not the American English culture but which also feature the frequent use of the accepting strategies in CRs, the author chooses the Uygur culture which is observed to be oriented to the accepting strategies in CRs. By analyzing both the L1 data and L2 data of CRs of the Uygur and the Han Chinese subjects, the author finds that Giao's theory is universal in some sense, at least for the data of this study.