A Contrastive Analysis Of Parental Criticism Strategies In Chinese And American Sitcoms

Criticism is a subtle yet prevailing speech act in daily communication. Comparing with other speech acts, our understanding of criticism is rather limited due to the fact that it is under-researched in literature. Since there isn't sufficient research on the speech act of criticism, this paper intends to contribute to fill this gap by analyzing the parental criticism cross-culturally, mainly focusing on the pragmatic strategies involved. The main analysis is carried out in the following two parts.The previous two chapters intend to construct a theoretical framework for analyzing parental criticism. After coping briefly with the definition, Chapter One presents a review of previous studies on the speech act of criticism. Chapter Two lays down the theoretical framework of the study, on the basis of speech act theory, politeness theory and culture related theories.The second part consists of Chapter Three, Chapter Four and Chapter Five, which are devoted to a contrastive analysis of Chinese and American parental criticisms. Chapter Three introduces the research methodology and data collection. Chinese sitcom Family with Sons and Daughters and American sitcom Growing Pains are chosen to build up a corpus with 765 parental criticisms. Chapter Four carries out the quantitative and qualitative data analysis. 23 kinds of pragmatic strategies are identified with their frequency computed. Chapter Five discusses the results of the data analysis. In criticizing children, Chinese and American parents employ most types of the strategies, while differ in the frequency of using certain kinds. These similarities and differences are further illustrated from the perspectives of culture universality and cultural value differences.Being the first pragmatic approach to parental criticism, the present study supplements the existing speech act studies to some extent, while some areas still call for further research.