A Comparative Study Of Congratulatory Speech Act Between Chinese And American College Students

Speech act is a fundamental tool of studying communication competence. S ince Austin and Searle propose speech act theory, many researchers begin to study speech act in pragmatics and sociolinguistics. Overwhelming studies mainly include speech acts of request, apology, refusal and compliment, but studies of congratulatory speech act are comparatively few in various fields.From cross-cultural perspective, combining politeness theory in pragmatics, the thesis makes a comparative analysis on discourse modes and congratulating strategies of congratulatory speech act between Chinese and American college students and discusses the reasons for similarities and differences on discourse modes and congratulating strategies of congratulatory speech act between Chinese and American college students. Data for the study is collected with the instrument: Discourse Completion Task(DCT). The subjects include two groups: the first group is college students in Xinjiang University in C hina and the second group is college students in Tulane University in America. The questionnaires are total 100: 50 C hinese questionnaires are provided for Chinese college students and 50 English questionnaires are provided for American college students.The findings of the research reveal that there are similarities and differences existing in congratulatory speech act between Chinese college students and American college students. Firstly, C hinese and American college students adopt three basic elements of discourse mode to realize congratulations: alerter, auxiliary language and head act. In the usage of auxiliary language, Chinese college students often put the auxiliary language before head act and American college students often put auxiliary language behind head act. Secondly, C hinese and American college students employ seven congratulating strategies: ―IFID‖, ―Expression of emotion‖, ―Praise‖, ―Request for information‖, ―O ffer good wishes‖, ―A suggestion to celebrate‖ and ―Encouragement‖. Among them, ―IFID‖ and ―Offer good wishes‖ are used frequently by C hinese and American college students. Chinese college students use more congratulating strategies than American college students do. Similar cognitive perception towards the world and frequent communication between cultures lead to some similarities on congratulatory speech act made by C hinese and American college students. However, different thinking patterns, cultures and social variables: induction and deduction, collectivism and individualism, social power and social distance cause the differences of congratulatory speech acts between C hinese and American college students.According to the findings above, theoretically, the thesis enriches the speech act theory and the comparative study of congratulatory speech act. Practically, its findings provide help for cross-cultural communications and foreign language teaching and learning.