Language Attitudes Of Sichuan-Native College Students Toward Sichuanhua And Putonghua

Speech Accommodation Theory (SAT) mainly explains interlocutors' emotional factors and psychological motivations arising from ways in which speakers adopt speech accommodation strategies like convergence, divergence to change or conceal their social identities, in order to be better accepted by conversation partners. The theory illuminates the relations among language behavior, social identity and intergroup relations. Language is a marker of one's social identity. Attitude toward a particular speaker of a language or variety, to some extent, represents the attitude toward the language or variety, at the same time, represents the attitude toward the group speaking the variety. Under the theoretical framework of SAT, the present empirical language attitude study chooses Sichuan dialect (Sichuanhua) and Mandarine (Putonghua) as research objects, and intends to present Sichuan-native college students' (SNCS) language attitudes (LA) toward the two varieties when speech accommodation strategies are used in intergroup communications, and to discover the intergroup relations of the two social groups speaking the two varieties.The respondents of the experiment listen to four conversations in which four types of accommodation strategies are used by two speakers, and then the LA toward Sichuanhua and Putonghua can be drawn from respondents' evaluations toward the two speakers. Four freshmen classes are chosen to carry on the experiment respectively, and finally 140 subjects are valid, 35 for each class. The independent variables are speeches of the two varieties, dependent variables are evaluations toward the two varieties, and other social variables are all controlled. The LA data are collected by 'the bilingual code-switching paradigm', and the tool of 'the group identification scale' is applied to ensure respondents' native Sichuan identity. One-way ANOVA and non-parametric multi-group rank sum test is applied to determine significant effect. The study proposes three questions: 1. What are the overall LA of SNCS toward Sichuanhua and Putonghua? 2. What are the SNCS' LA toward the two varieties when speech accommodation strategies are used in intergroup communications? 3. What are the intergroup relations reflected by the LA of SNCS?The conclusion suggests: 1. For an overall comparison, SNCS favor Putonghua more than their regional dialect Sichuanhua in intergroup communication. 2. When...