Pragmatic Transfer In Second Language Acquisition

Pragmatic transfer, an important issue in interlanguage pragmatics, refers to the transferof the first language pragmatic competence in performing second language speech acts. Dueto the quick development of the theory and thoughts in the field of second languageacquisition and pragmatics, the study of pragmatic transfer has gained a great momentum.Speech act, which consists of locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act, isoften used as minimal aspect to study pragmatic transfer. Learners, unfamiliar with the targetlanguage socio-cultural norm, may carry the pragmatic knowledge in their own language inthe performance of speech act in the target language. Language transfer at the level of thephonology, syntax and semantics has long been studied by SLA researchers while pragmatictransfer is not investigated by researchers until1980s.There is a great controversy among the few empirical studies on the pragmatic transfer.Some studies claim that pragmatic transfer exists in the whole process of second languageacquisition while others show that there is no pragmatic transfer at all. Thus an empiricalstudy is designed, aiming to solve this controversy. By collecting the discourse completiontest among native speakers of Chinese, native speakers of English and Chinese learners ofEnglish and comparing their use frequency and order of semantic formulae in performing therefusal speech act, the study provides empirical evidence to the existence of pragmatictransfer. The study also finds out the extent to which pragmatic transfer happens is differentand continues to discuss six major factors influencing pragmatic transfer: linguisticcompetence, language level, social context, markedness, prototypicality, language distanceand developmental factors. The limitations to the empirical research and its implications forsecond language acquisition are discussed as well.