Pragmatic Transfer In Compliment Responses By Chinese College English Learners

In most speech communities, the speech act of complimenting is a well established politeness strategy. While the giving of and responding to compliments can be regarded as rather universal across different languages and cultures, the form, frequency and function of compliments and compliment responses significantly varies. This thesis compares American English compliment responses to the realizations of the same speech act in Chinese and analyzes the pragmatic transfer in compliment responses made by the Chinese learners of English.In the last three decades, the speech event of complimenting and compliment responding has been one of the major interests which sociolinguistic research has focused upon. There are extensive studies on this respective speech act in American English (e.g. Pomerantz 1978, Manes and Wolfson 1980) as well as comparative cross-cultural research on complimenting behavior, examining the differences in speech act realization between variants of English (American /Irish , e.g. Schneider 1999; American /South African, e.g. Herbert 1989), and between English and other languages (Chinese, e.g. Chen 1993; German, e.g. Golato 2002). These studies of communicative competence make apparent that communicating effectively and efficiently in a language requires more than just linguistic knowledge; the ability to use this linguistic knowledge appropriately in the given sociocultural context is also essential.Learners with insufficient pragmatic knowledge frequently transfer patterns from their native language into the foreign language. Second language teaching profits from studies in communicative competence because it provides teachers with information on realization strategies concerning certain speech acts in different languages.In this thesis, two questions are proposed before the research:RQ1. How differently do Chinese and Americans respond to compliments? RQ2. To what extent do Chinese learners of English reflect their L1 behaviors when responding to compliments in English?Firstly a comparison between the realization strategies concerning compliment Responses in Chinese and American English is made. The data used in the thesis are from the Chinese College English learners. And to the American English compliment responses, the thesis uses the data collected and analyzed by R. Chen in 1993. It is proved that there is a significant difference in compliment responses between Chinese and American English.Then, the pragmatic transfer in compliment responses by Chinese learners of English is discussed. Generally speaking there are three types of pragmatic transfer, they are: pragmalinguistic transfer, sociopragmatic transfer and pragmarhetoric transfer.Different manifestations of pragmatic transfer have been identified in the literature: interference or negative transfer and facilitative or positive transfer are the most obvious types. Most studies address the negative manifestation of pragmatic transfer because it is closely related to the presentation of self, to the image of ourselves that we communicate to others. But the pragmatic transfer is not necessarily negative. The Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis suggested that if the two languages involved were different, there would be negative transfer as the learners would experience difficulty that was very likely to result in the production of errors; and if the two languages were similar, there would be positive transfer since learning would be made easier and few errors are likely to result. There are various elements that may cause pragmatic transfer, including the cross-culturally different assessments of power or social distance, different value judgments of different language group and so on. There is also a difference between males and females when responding to a compliment. Generally speaking, women receive more compliments than men do.This may be due to the different social roles played by men and women in society, or probably, it is because of the different psychological characteristics of men and women, and this issue needs further study.Based on the conclusions drawn from the analysis in this thesis, some implications can be found for the teachers of English. The necessary condition for pragmatic learning is conscious attention to the pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic information to be acquired. The teachers have the responsibility of providing the students with the necessary tools to make the appropriate pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic decisions in the target language. One way is suggested that teachers can help students become pragmatically aware and improve their pragmatic knowledge by providing them with the sort of metapragmatic information outlined in this thesis. Another way is by experiencing such as reading, listening, watching movies or interacting with native speakers.