A Contrastive Study Of The Speech Act Of Persuasion In Chinese And American English

Since Austin and Searle establish their Speech Act Theory, researchers have investigated such speech acts as apologies, complaints, refusals, promises, and so on in detail, except the speech act of persuasion. Plus, most studies are conducted from such perspectives as psychology, sociology, mass media,and so on, few adopting the linguistic perspective, not to say pragmatics. Systematical research on Chinese persuasion are even fewer, not to say a contrastive study between Chinese and American English.This thesis studies persuasion in China and America from the perspectives of pragmatics and cross-cultural comparison.In all, 50 Chinese and 50 Americans participate in the study. The data are collected using a discourse completion test (DCT). The questionnaire includes five situations. From the collected data, I identify four types of persuasion, and focus on analyzing face-to-face persuasion. I also detect eight strategies in face-to-face persuasion, and examine them in the five situations.The study evidences that there exist similarities and differences in persuasion strategies in China and America; that across the five situations, neither group is prone to non-verbal persuasion and non-face-to-face persuasion, though the two groups sharply differ in the strategies of option out, face-to-face persuasion and'others'; that the most frequently used strategy by Chinese is face-to-face persuasion, while Americans are prone to use face-to-face persuasion in some situation, and'others'and option out in other situations; that in face-to-face persuasion, both groups are prone to adopt rewarding activity, while punishing activity, expertise and the applying of excuse are seldom used. As a whole, the most frequently used face-to-face persuasion strategy by the Chinese is rewarding activity, while Americans request; and the Chinese use much more strategies than Americans. In addition, the study also finds out that both groups differ in the choice of situations, namely one situation typical to the Chinese may not exist or be seldom used by the Americans.All the above findings may help enrich our knowledge about the speech act of persuasion, and is of great implications to cross-cultural communication, and English teaching and leaning.