A Cross-cultural Study Of Speech Act Of Apology Between Chinese And Americans

Apology, as one of the speech acts, has always been the subject of extensive research in the field of pragmatics and sociolinguistics. The speech act of apology is one kind of behavior which is intended to provide support for the hearer who is actually or potentially offended by a violation. As cooperation and contacts increase between Chinese and Americans, misunderstandings or even conflicts may often arise in cross-cultural communications due to different cultures and values. Therefore, in order to help people cultivate intercultural communicative competence and achieve better communicative purposes in intercultural communications, it is necessary to study the speech act of apology between Chinese and Americans.This paper firstly introduces some basic knowledge of cross-cultural communication and two related theories: speech act theory and face theory. And then it discusses some related knowledge of the speech act of apology and its different realization patterns. Then it carries on a cross-cultural comparison of Chinese and American speech act of apology and its realization patterns, investigates both the similarities and differences between them from the perspective of semantics and pragmatics and probes into cultural factors causing these differences. And at last, some strategies to deal with these differences are suggested and the implications of these differences to EFL teaching, EFL learning and cross-cultural communication are explored in detail.The author concludes that Chinese and American apologies and the realization patterns of apologies are quite different in many aspects, such as the different lexical meanings, frequency, specific selection of realization patterns and the weight of social distance, relative power and so on, though they have a lot in common. As second language learners, we should adopt as many strategies as possible to deal with these differences in order to achieve success in cross-cultural communication. It is hoped that the results of this paper could reveal some cultural values underlying these differences and help people improve their intercultural communicative competence.