A Cross-Cultural Study On The Realization Of The Speech Act Of Introduction

This is a Chinese-English contrastive study on the realization of the speech act of"introduction".My first reason to launch this study was due to the fact that since John Austin's establishment of the Speech Act Theory in 1955, researchers have investigated speech acts such as advice/refusal of advice, apologies, complaints, compliments/responses, correction of factual error, disagreement, giving directions, giving embarrassing information, giving gifts, greetings, letters of application, miscommunication, negative responses to questions, negation, opting out, refusals, reprimanding/responding, requests, suggesting, thanks, and so on, except, however, that the speech act of"introduction".My other reason lied in the fact that as an indispensable component in social interaction,"introduction"stands out as an important speech act itself, and that an appropriate introduction will leave a good impression on the hearer and pave the way for further communication. Nevertheless, the diversity of introduction is always ignored because it is often conveyed with simple sentences like"this is…"or"I am…".The data for analysis were collected using role-play situations, interviews, internet-surfing and real life observations. Five situations of role-plays were used as the main source to solicit responses from 30 native Mandarin speakers, 30 native American English speakers, and 30 Chinese students of English, while Internet-surfing and observations as supplementary data. Based on the analyses of the available data, it was found that:1. An introduction contains three parts: greeting/attention-getter + address form + head act. Native Mandarin speakers used nine categories of address forms in introduction. Both native American English speakers and Chinese students of English used six categories of address forms. Head act was analyzed from introduction perspective and the strategies applied in the speech act. The three groups of people used hearer dominance, speaker dominance, speaker-hearer dominance and implicit perspective in introduction. Viewed from the perspective of introduction strategies, native Mandarin speakers used six introduction strategies, namely, wisdom in names, hearer sympathy, linear...