Probing Into The Criticism Speech Acts In Sino-American BBSes

One of the focuses in cross-cultural pragmatics study is speech acts. Within the field, the list ofrelative researches such as request, threat, and criticism in praise goes on and substantial findings havebeen obtained by means of comparative study under the norms of Oriental and Occidental cultures.However, the results of the study of critical speech acts are only a handful. Therefore, great potentials andpractical values are still remained for its exploring, especially in the case of the booming of today’sInternet culture. The linguistic features of criticism intention’s realization in communication, thesimilarities and differences of criticism strategies’ adoption, and the factors affecting criticism strategies’adopting consist of the hard nut to crack.Based on the point of view that specific speech acts reflecting the specific culture, this study aims toestablish the authentic corpus by means of selecting and processing the comments of netizens in bothAmerican and Chinese BBSes concerning Google pulling out of China to compare and analysis thecriticism speech acts from the perspective of trans-cultural pragmatics with the support of the speech acttheory, face theory, as well as an analytical framework of network criticism speech act. A total2000critical remarks were made by Sino-American netizens on the BBSes of the People, Tianya Forum,Dayang, New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today and other web forums since January23rd,2010to April23rd,2010about Google pulls out of China.By means of frequency comparisons and chi-square test, It could be found that Chinese netizens holdfuzzy attitudes on Google’s moving out of China and their criticism speech acts are sentence-based；Reversely, American Internet users are in favor of its moving out with paragraph-based criticism speechacts. Both of them cherish criticism strategies of direct criticism and irony. Next, when Sino-Americannetizens perform the speech acts, the commonly adopted criticism strategies are direct criticism, irony,questioning, and reminder. The less frequently applied strategies by two countries’ netizens are criticism inpraises, hints, self-criticism and wish. Furthermore, the frequencies of employing criticism strategies suchas command, irony and questioning by Americans are much higher than Chinese netizens.Language is the carrier of culture. In the final analysis, it could be concluded that the differences inthe adoption of criticism strategies take root in the differential cultural values and norms of Orient andOccident. Traditionally, Chinese people are affected by the tradition of collectivism and social hierarchyand rarely openly criticize the controversial topics. Keeping others’‘face’ and maintaining harmony in the surroundings are their focuses. On the contrary, Americans are willing to face squarely on criticism,discuss controversial issues and insist on personal viewpoints with the realities respected, but theygenerally turn blind eyes to keep others’’face’. As a result of the present world is characteristics ofmulti-cultures coexisting and ever-expanding internet culture, Eastern and Western culture collide andintegrate mutually. Therefore, the corpus analysis demonstrates that both of the two countries’ criticismremarks tend to direct while American netizens are more inclined to the comprehensive adoption of avariety of criticism strategies to achieve the criticism intention.To sum up, the conclusions reached in this thesis are not an end, but a tentative attempt. Follow-upstudies on the same topic should collect as much naturally occurring corpus as possible to establish anauthentic corpus of enough large capacity in order to obtain more valuable results.