A Contrastive Study Of The Speech Act Of Threat Between American College Students And Chinese College Students

In the past two decades, there are three papers, which discuss exclusively the speech act of threat both at home and abroad. These papers are written in English and are contextualised in English-speaking countries. Although many other scholars mention the act in passing in their works, people's understanding of it is still intuition-based.This paper is a contrastive study of the speech act of threat between American college students and Chinese college students. A systematic investigation is carried out for the first time from the perspective of realization patterns of the conditional threats, strategies employed by the college students to achieve their ultimate goal in the actualization of the speech act of threats, and effects of social variables on the realization patterns of the threats and the strategies used in both countries.This study adopts both a qualitative approach and a quantitative approach. Based on the achievements of some related early studies and the private conversations between the writer of this paper and his study partner from America, discourse completion tasks (DCTs) and multiple choice questionnaire (MCQ) are designed to collect data from altogether 170 college students from eight classes of different majors in Towson University and Anhui University. Out of 1360 situations contained in the questionnaires, 935 threats are successfully elicited. Of them, the Chinese subjects produce 480, and the American subjects 455.Major findings of the study are as follows:Firstly, from the data collected, three realization patterns of the underlying structure of the conditional threats, that is, "condition + consequence", "consequence + condition" and "vague class", are abstracted. Results of Chi-square tests indicate that there is a cultural difference between American college students and Chinese college students, which is evident in and further confirmed by the difference between American female college students and Chinese female college students, the difference...