Contrastive Study Of Speech Act Between Chinese And English Business Invitation Letters

From the perspective of pragmatics, the thesis contrastively studies the realization patterns of speech act of invitation, including structures, sequences and pragmatic strategies of every segment in Chinese and English business invitation letters, and explores the cultural factors resulting in such differences on the realization patterns. The corpus is business invitation letters: Chinese business invitation letters written by Chinese native people and English business invitation letters written by English native people included. The letters mainly come from the Internet, CNKI and daily collection. In terms of the operational definition for business invitation letters, we sample 30 copies of each language by the randomization technique of stratified and interval sampling. As the written discourse, every letter contains the basic structure of invitation: address term, head act and adjuncts. Based on the qualitative and quantitative analysis of similarities and differences on realization patterns in the direct and indirect speech act of invitation in business invitation letters, we find that:1. In the direct invitations, with regard to the head act, the most strategy used by Chinese and western inviters is explicit performatives. But it has higher frequency in Chinese than in English. Furthermore, most Chinese head act appear in the middle of the discourse with both pre-adjuncts and post-adjuncts; while most English appears in the very beginning of the discourse with adjuncts following. As to the address term, name of organization is the strategy more used by Chinese inviters while honorific+ general name is more applied by western inviters. About the adjuncts, statement and information supplement are the two strategies most often used by inviters. In the next place, Chinese inviters use more showing off advantages and grounder, while western inviters apply more dismissing doubts and feeling expectation to support their invitation.2. In the indirect invitations, about the head act, the wishes is the strategy used most frequently by inviters. However, Chinese inviters use more unconventionally indirect invitation as head act, but western inviters employ more conventionally indirect invitation strategy. Moreover, both Chinese and English head act most often appear in the middle of the discourse with pre-adjuncts and post-adjuncts. With regard to the address term, Chinese inviters are more apt to use name of organization while western inviters are more inclined to employ honorific+ name+ general name. As to the adjuncts, statement and information supplement are still the strategies used most. But Chinese inviters are tended to adopt grounder and showing off advantages, western inviters are likely to use promises and dismissing doubts.3. The culture is one of the factors leading to the differences on the realization patterns of invitation in Chinese and English business invitation letters. First are the differences on the mode of thinking-Chinese Collectivism and westerners'Individualism. Second concerns with the differences on logical inference-Chinese first cause and then effect versus westerners'linear. Third are the differences on the characters and manners-Chinese roundabout way and westerners'frankness. Last regard to the differences on the understanding of politeness Chinese focusing on the positive face while western people on negative face.By means of summarizing the research findings, the present study has some theoretical and practical significance. Theoretically, taken business invitation letters as corpus, the study on speech act of invitation can perfect not only Speech Act Theory, but also speech act of invitation. Practically, through contrasting the similarities and differences on realization patterns of invitation, one can better avoid cultural shock and reach cultural integration. It is also good for the second language teaching and learning. We conclude the characteristics and conventional form of realization patterns on invitation in these two languages. It can offer experiences and methods to the teachers, better cultivating the learners'cultural communicating competence, developing their pragmatic ability and avoiding pragmatic failure. At the same time, the present study brings some inspirations on the practice of translation.