A Contrastive Analysis Of English And Chinese Negative Evaluating Speech Acts In Computer-mediated Communication(CMC)

Negative evaluation is prevailing in daily communication,where speakers express not only literal meaning,but also their personal attitudes and feelings towards an entity,an event or a behavior.Compared with positive ones,negative evaluation is more likely to involve with communication conflicts because of its negative nature.However,only a few of previous studies concentrated on negative evaluation from a perspective of Speech Act Theory and what is more,they focused on either spoken or written context.The cross-language studies in computer-mediated communication(CMC)context have not been covered yet.Based on Speech Act Theory,the present study makes a contrastive analysis between English and Chinese negative evaluating speech acts in the CMC context,by adopting both qualitative and quantitative research methods.Three research questions are proposed in this study: 1.What strategies are employed in English and Chinese negative evaluation? What are the similarities and differences? 2.What CMC features are manifested in English and Chinese negative evaluation? What are the similarities and differences? 3.What is the significant relationship between strategies and CMC features of negative evaluation? What are the similarities and differences between English and Chinese? To answer above questions,a corpus is built with customer negative evaluations on Amazon online shopping website between 2014 and 2015.Research findings are as follows:To begin with,twelve strategies are generalized: making explicit negative evaluation,expressing negative emotions,identifying specific problems,making a comparison,discussing consequences,making recommendations,exemption from responsibility,presenting background information,making positive statements,making requests,questioning and drawing inference.The contrastive analysis results indicate that both English and Chinese negative evaluating speech acts adopt several direct strategies,such as making explicit negative evaluation,expressing negative emotions and identifying specific problems.However,for the differences,English negative evaluating speech acts adopt the following strategies more frequently: making comparison,discussing consequences,and presenting background information;while Chinese negative evaluating speech acts only use the strategy,questioning,more frequently than their English counterparts.Above results indicated that strategies adopted by English negative evaluation are relatively objective and direct,while ones adopted by Chinese negative evaluation incline to be subjective and indirect.Then the present study discovers six general features of CMC negative evaluation: use of special symbols,capitalizations,non-standard use of spelling,non-standard use of punctuations,colloquial expressions and use of emoticons.The quantitative analysis outputs reveal that there is no significant difference between English and Chinese in terms of CMC features.Although CMC features are only found in a small number of negative evaluation for both English and Chinese,it is also found that English negative evaluating speech acts include more capitalization,while Chinese ones use amount of non-standard punctuation.The reason behind is probably due to characteristics of Amazon customer evaluation forum,which is more formal than other CMC modes.At last,by exploring the significant relationship existed in negative evaluative strategies and CMC features of two languages,it is found that English negative evaluating speech acts seldom include non-standard spelling in text when making explicit negative evaluation;frequently include non-standard punctuations in text when making requests and questioning;frequently include colloquial expressions when presenting background information.On the other hand,Chinese negative evaluating speech acts frequently include non-standard spelling in text when presenting background information and making positive statements;frequently include nonstandard punctuation in text when making explicit negative evaluation.The contrastive analysis results show that both English and Chinese negative evaluating speech acts frequently adopt non-standard punctuations to perform direct negative evlautive strategies,while indirect ones are realized by non-standard spelling or colloquial expressions.To sum up,the present study conducts a contrastive analysis between English and Chinese negative evaluation on Amazon online shopping website,which offers new insights and fruits to the field of negative evaluating speech act by relating it to the CMC context.It is also hoped that the discussions about negative evaluating strategies and CMC features are able to guide further customers and sellers when performing or understanding negative evaluating speech acts.