The Study On Chinese Comforting

There are lots of ways to express comfort and comforting is one of them, as the form of speech. By expressing comforting we can reduce or lessen others’ negative emotions, and as a result protect his physical and mental health. It also helps establish and maintain interpersonal relationships.A speech act is defined as comforting, when it follows these principles:(1) The discourse is referred to the Hearer’s negative emotions or the event which causes the negative emotions;(2) The Speaker thinks that the Hearer is in the bad mood because of the negative event, so it is necessary to comfort the Hearer, and he believes the Hearer would be comforted by the discourse;(3) The Speaker wants to make the Hearer feel better sincerely;(4) The discourses is an attempt of implementing comforting, the purpose of which is reducing the Hearer’s negative emotions and make him feel better.The Chinese comforting is the discourses which are expressed to implement the act of comforting in Chinese.The Chinese comforting consists of four parts, and they are core components,auxiliary components, additional components and nonverbal symbols. We classify the Chinese comforting by three different criteria, such as the comforter’s sincerity, content of comforting and the combination of different components. The expression of Chinese comforting is influenced by both subject context factors and the object ones from the expects of the choice of strategies, ways, content and effects.The strategies from the perspective of pragmatics are the methods and forms of comforting, which include false information strategy, the strategy of taking the Hearer as a third party, humor, ironic phrases and person deixis. The strategies from the perspective of psychology are the content of comforting, which include emotion-centered strategies, problem-centered strategies and changing the subject.Pragmatics failure may occur if we neglect the Hearer, time, and the topic, as well aswhen we have different viewpoints from the comfortee’s. To avoid the failures, we needs to understand the comfortee, cultivate meta-pragmatic awareness and do empathy training.