Culturally Dependent Pragmatic Strategies: A Comparative Analysis Of Readers' Criticism Speech Acts On Chinese And American News Websites

The study of speech acts is an important focus in cross-cultural pragmatics. Within the field of questing Chinese and western cultural norms, comparative studies of such speech acts as request, apology, and compliment flourish and have contributed substantial findings, while the study of criticism still sees great potentials for exploring, especially the criticism speech acts in internet communication.Based on the proposition that individuals'speech acts embody their cultural background, the present thesis takes Speech Act Theory, Brown & Levinson's Politeness Theory, and Hofstede's dimensions of Cultural Variability as theoretical supports, and analyzes a total 480 critical remarks made by native readers on the websites of Ifeng News Report, China Daily, Dayoo News, Tengxun News, Washington Post, American News & World Report, and New York Times. These remarks are about current international affairs, national political and social issues in 2009, whose similarities and differences in the use of criticism strategies are examined via calculating frequencies and conducting Chi-square tests. The thesis also touches on the readers'pragmatic preferences when different types of situational contexts are involved.Withχ2(19,0.000)=57.016>χ2(19,0.05)=30.14, the Chi-square result indicates significant difference between the two groups of criticism speech acts. Yet follow-up tests show that such significance is mainly attributed to the applications of some of the strategies. In addition, the Chinese and American netnews readers show both common and divergent strategic preferences when the types of situational contexts vary (i.e., different types of news topic, social distance and power distance). The findings suggest distinctive cultural norms, in which the internet's advocate of equality and personal freedom overrides the concepts of social hierarchy and collectivism in influencing criticism speech acts on the Chinese news websites.The internet provides a non-traditional but prominent communication path. Therefore, the study about it is intended to draw people's attentions to the essence of criticism speech acts and cultural norms embedded in internet communication. The thesis may provide certain references for cross-cultural pragmatic studies of internet communication.