A Comparative Study Of Sino-American Apology Speech Act Under The Perspective Of Cultural Dimensions

Many scholars have paid much attention to Speech Act theory, which is one of the subcategories in the field of linguistics. Given that Speech Act of apology is context-dependent, Holmes and Meier et al. locate apology as when offences happen apology is adopted by offenders to remedy self-image and relationships with complainers, to recover complainers' face, to restore harmony, eventually to keep equilibrium of speech act. Anna Trosborg holds that apologists could adopt different apology strategies to restore harmony and save face. She classifies apology strategies into seven types, which include Strategy One: minimizing the degree of offence, Strategy Two: acknowledgement of responsibility, Strategy Three: explaining or account, Strategy Four: expression of apology Strategy Five: offer of repair, Strategy Six: promise of forbearance, Strategy Seven: expressing concern for the hearer. Besides the above listed seven types, Trosborg defines refusal to acknowledge guilt as Strategy Zero.Hofstede(1980), in his book cultural consequences, proposes four cultural dimensions to compare cultural differences, which are power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism-collectivism, and masculinity-femininity. In the second revised edition, he adds the fifth cultural dimension--long-term versus short-term orientation. As one of the most important theoretical concepts in inter-cultural field, individualism and collectivism cultural dimension has been adopted far and wide by scholars to study cultural differences among communities. According to his theory, people in individualistic cultures seek for self-independence, self-interest and are responsible for themselves and they don't rely on groups. By contrast, people in collectivistic cultures value the groups' interests and attach great importance to other people' interests. In these cultures, the groups' interests supersede individual interest and even individual interest can be ignored. People keep loyalty to community in exchange of community's protection. Characteristics of individualism and collectivism(I/C for short) can be better manifested at workplace. When confrontations occur, people under different cultural dimensions choose different apology strategies.Based on Hofstede's I/C cultural dimension, this thesis takes apology strategies at workplace as its study objectives and compares differences in the choice of Sino-American apology strategies. 100 apology strategies are collected from 13 Chinese films and 100 apology strategies from 11 American films, which are chosen randomly. By means of comparison, it is obvious that seven types of apology strategies as well as Strategy Zero are all employed at workplace when conflicts happen, but there exist differences in the frequency of usage. The results of chi-square show there exist real differences in using such three apology strategies as minimizing the degree of offence, expression of apology and refusal to apology between Chinese people and American people with Chinese people's refusal to apology accounting for 5?, minimizing the degree of offense accounting for 3?, expression of apology accounting for 49?and American people's refusal to apology accounting for 12?, minimizing the degree of offence accounting for 22?, expression of apology accounting for 33?. The results of chi-square test verify hypothesis of this thesis that under the influence of I/C cultural dimension, Chinese people and American people prefer to choose different apology strategies at workplace. Chinese people tend to choose expression to save other people's interests and keep internal harmony, while American people prefer to choose minimizing the degree of offence as well as refusal to apology to save self-interest.Cultural origins influencing Chinese collectivism culture and American individualism culture are analyzed in this thesis. This thesis demonstrates them from three aspects: geographical location, religious philosophy and economic development in hope of strengthening readers' further understanding of individualism and collectivism cultural dimension.Through studying speech act of apology from cultural dimensions, this thesis provides a new perspective for studying speech acts, meanwhile strengthens the understanding of Hofstede's five cultural dimensions. This thesis enriches inter-cultural communication field and also exerts positive influence on people's communication at workplace.