| Speech acts are the important research field in pragmatics. Studies of pragmatic failure in the field are beneficial not only to the understanding of language function and nature, but also to the study of the influences exerted by culture differences on language thoughts. Since speech acts are culture specific, it is presumed that lack of adequate social cultural communicative competence in performing the speech acts is the major cause of communication failures. Communication among different cultures should all observe and maintain politeness principles. However, due to different cultures and values, people are confined to adopting different politeness strategies in the communication. The speech acts of acceptance and refusal are very special, because acceptance and refusal are not only influenced by different social identity and social distance, but also pose an inherent threat to addressee's face. As a result, interlocutors should make use of semantic formulae appropriate to the target culture norms in order to minimize negative effects of the FTA. From the pedagogical perspective, acceptance and refusal are both worth investigating, for Chinese learners of English not only need to recognize the linguistic forms necessary to produce the speech act, but also need to be aware of social culture values that characterize the target community ; that is, to be sensitive to the target culture by communicating appropriately in any given situation. Therefore, the pragmatic strategies of acceptance and refusal appropriate to the target norms play a crucial role in the success of intercultural communication. Based on politeness principles of Brown & Levinson and Gu Yueguo, the current study has accomplished a case study where the pragmatic competence of Chinese English learners is investigated in terms of Thomas' pragmatic failure and pragmatic transfer.The 234 subjects in the study are taken from Dalian University of Technology (DUT) and divided into three different groups with different L2 learning time, respectively, 70 undergraduates, 75 graduates and 89 doctoral candidates. The three groups constitute the different language proficiency levels within each one and the hierarchical English learning time among them. The subjects are asked to make appropriate choices in accordance with their natural responses of acceptance and refusal in daily communication.The instrument used in collecting the data for this study is a multiple choice test questionnaire adapted from a model designed in contextual situations by Li Yue'e and Wang Aihua . The questionnaire consists of 22 specific situations where the choices are made to perform acceptance and refusal acts, namely, accepting and refusing request, offer, invitation and suggestion. The analysis of the data investigates the frequency of and the preference for acceptance and refusal strategies or semantic formulae, taking pragmalinguistic failure into account, and the role of such social variables as social distance and social identity played in the directness level of acceptance and refusal. Another emphasis of the study is put on the extent of pragmatic transfer occurrence in the subjects' production of acceptance and refusal strategies.With the statistic data of the questionnaire, both intra-group and inter-group comparative analysis and discussion are made in terms of the pragmatic failure frequencies of acceptance and refusal acts, including politeness strategy analysis, culture difference analysis and pragmatic transfer analysis. From the analysis of similarities and differences in acceptance and refusal given by different subjects, the results indicate the following points: (1) As for the pragmatic failure of employing directness and indirectness in the speech acts of acceptance and refusal, the occurrence of indirectness pragmatic failure generally appears much less than that of directness among the three groups. (2) The social identity shows strong influences on the subjects' acceptance and refusal strategies. In the higher situation where the respondent's identity is higher than the speaker's, the three groups are more subject to pragmatic failure than in the lower one. (3) The statistics and comparison of the frequencies of semantic formulae chosen by the subjects make out that both positive and negative pragmatic transfer occur in the learners' acceptance and refusal strategies. What's more, the influence of positive transfer is much more obvious than the one of negative transfer. (4) On the condition of the same learning time, the intra-group comparison also demonstrates the occurrence of pragmatic transfer in the acceptance and refusal acts among the English learners with different linguistic proficiencies. Furthermore, pragmatic transfer increases as learners' proficiency increases, supporting Takahashi and Beebe's positive correlation hypothesis where since more proficient learners have enough control over the target language to express sentiments of their native language at the pragmatic levels, they are more likely to transfer their native language sociocultural norms into the target language than less proficiency learners who are hindered from transferring complex native language pragmatics due to their limited target language knowledge. On the condition of hierarchical learning time, the comparison among the three groups offers a justification to O'Grady's "developmental errors". The frequency of pragmatic failure initially be small, but then increase before finally decreasing.Finally, in language learning, learners need not only to pay more attention to the acceptance and refusal strategies used most frequently by the native speaker of the target culture, but also to have an awareness of the way of accepting and refusing in their own culture. Only through the comprehensive understanding of the pragmatic norms in both cultures, can they better acquire the competence of performing the speech act of acceptance and refusal. The present study confirms that the culture differences between Chinese and English have great influences on the learners' performance of politeness principles and their pragmatic failure in the intercultural communication. The thesis puts forward some proposals that while teaching linguistic knowledge, teachers should make adequate adjustments of language input materials according to the characteristics of different learning phases so as to strengthen students' pragmatic and culture difference awareness and improve their intercultural communication competence. |
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