Speech Act Of Apology In Chinese And American English: A Cross-Cultural Study

In cross-cultural communication and second/foreign language learning, differences in language use have been noted to be a factor for communicative breakdown or pragmatic failure. It is necessary for language learners to develop communicative competence, which requires learners to understand the different norms of speaking as well as the rules of grammar specific to that language. The prominence of communicative competence in the goals of second/foreign language teaching highlights the need to study appropriate ways of conveying communicative intent in various situations.The study of speech act has long been regarded as one of the central concerns of pragmatics, especially cross-cultural pragmatics. And it is also the basic tools of the study of communicative competence. Based on researches on apology strategies used by speakers of various linguistic and cultural backgrounds, this thesis conducts a cross-cultural study on speech act of apology to describe and analyze the use of apology strategies in Chinese and American. Thirty native speakers of Chinese and twenty native speakers of American participated in the study. Data for this study is collected via a written questionnaire in the form of the discourse completion test (DCT), the most frequent elicitation method in speech act studies. Ten situations for apology are included in the questionnaires. Use of the eight apology strategies across the ten situations by Chinese and Americans are respectively analyzed and discussed in detail. The effects of social-pragmatic factors on the use of apology strategies are examined. Spearman correlation tests are conducted to see how the social-pragmatic factors are correlated with the choice of apology strategies. The social-pragmatic factors include social distance, social power and severity of offence.The most general finding is that there are similarities and differences on the use of apology strategies in Chinese and American. The similarities are that both languages share the same range of apology strategies and strategies of IFID and taking on responsibility are the most frequently used strategies. Differences primarily lie in situations where the speaker's social status is higher than the hearer's, in which Chinese use fewer apology strategies than Americans do. "Ren"and "Li" which characterize the Chinese culture and individualism which features the American culture lead to these differences.Based upon the findings, implications for teaching English as a foreign language are presented and the importance of strengthening language learners' cross-cultural awareness and developing their cross-cultural communicative competence are thus called for.