A Pragmatic Study Of Comforting Speech Act In Chinese

Comforting is a universally existing linguistic communicative behavior. Thecomforter performs comforting speech act in order to alleviate or lessen thecomfortee’s passive emotion because of the experienced negative events. However,comforting skills are not inborn and need to be learned. The aim to study comfortingspeech act is to deeply understand comforting and to effectively and appropriatelyapply comforting in daily life.This paper based on the speech act theories, takes comforting speech act inChinese as research object and collects data through discourse completion test inorder to qualitatively and quantitatively analyze comforting strategies in Chinese. Inaddition, the effects of power distance between communicators and the gender ofcomforters on the selection of comforting strategies are discussed according to thestatistical analysis.This paper consists of five chapters. Chapter One briefly introduces the study,including research background, research question, research significance and thesisorganization. Chapter Two firstly introduces the speech act theories of Austin andSearle, based on which comforting speech act is clearly defined. Then, Chapter Twooffers an overall picture of the previous studies of comforting both abroad and homeand makes criticism on them as well.Chapter Three elaborates the research method and procedure. The data collectioninstrument is discourse completion test. The designed questionnaire consists of tenuncompleted discourses for the subjects to finish. In these ten situations, the comforterand the comfortee are of different power distance: they may have equal power, or thecomforter has power over the comfortee, or vice versa. The data analysis processincludes both qualitative categorization of comforting strategies and quantitativecalculation of each strategy’s frequency.Chapter Four discusses the strategies of comforting speech act in Chinese and theeffects of power distance and gender of the comforter on the selection of comfortingstrategies. Firstly, according to Burleson’s criterion of person-centeredness, all thespeech acts are put into three categories: low, moderately and highly person-centeredstrategies and further into the detailed strategies and sub-strategies. Secondly,comforting strategies are quantitatively analyzed. The number of each comfortingstrategy in Chinese and their frequencies are calculated. Moreover, the frequencies of comforting strategies are also investigated according to power distance and gender inorder to discuss the influence of the two social variables.Then the paper draws the conclusion. It is found that Chinese people are moreinclined to choose low person-centered strategies and this inclination is notsignificantly affected by power distance and gender of the comforter. However, thesetwo social variables still have certain influence within each of the three categories ofcomforting strategies. For instance, among moderately person-centered strategies,men are likely to divert the hearer’s attention while women are inclined tocompliment the hearer’s strength or achievement; among low person-centeredstrategies, men prefer to help to solve the problem while women are likely to negatethe event.The last chapter of this paper summarizes the major findings, points outlimitations of this study and makes suggestions for future research.