Anempirical Study On Prag Matic Transferin In Terlanguage Complaints By Chinerse EFL Learners

The study ofInterlanguage Pragmatics has become a growing concern of researchers in recent years.Pragmatic transfer,as an essential component of Interlanguage Pragmatics,is not only a controversial issue of second language acquisition,but also one of the factors leading to cross-cultural communication failure,and it is mostly discussed by exploring various speech acts.Complaint,as an important speech act,is frequently used in daily life,but it is also difficult and complex to research due to its “face-threatening” nature.In order to avoid pragmatic failure,it is necessary to study the pragmatic transfer in the speech act of complaint.The present study attempts to identifythe complaint strategies used by the Chinese EFL learners,and tries to find out if there is any evidence of pragmatic transfer in their speech act of complaints based on the theory of Leech's(1983)Politeness Principle,Brown and Levinson's(1987)Face Theory and Gu's(1992)Chinese Politeness Principle.Three groups participated in the experiments.The first two were the control groups,which included 30 Chinese native speakers(CNSs)for the Chinese baseline data,30 American native speakers of English(ANSs)for the English baseline data.The third group involved 110 Chinese EFL learners.The data were collected by means of an open Discourse Completion Test(DCT)with four academic situations in their campus life which were different in terms of social power and social distance.The English version of the DCT was given to the ANSs and Chinese EFL learners,and the translated version of it was given to the CNSs.In order to identify the complaint strategies used by Chinese EFL learners,the data were coded according to the complaint taxonomy proposed by Prykarpatska(2008)and analyzed in terms of the choice,frequency,and semantic formula of complaint strategies.The results of the study showed thatthere were differences and similarities among the three groups in performing the speech act of complaints regarding the choice,frequency,and semantic formula of strategies.Besides this,the findings revealed that the signs of transfer from the first language to second language presented in some specific situations in the DCT.In addition,social power and social distance were two significant variables to influence Chinese EFL learners' pragmatic transfer,and otherfactors causing transfer were analyzed in the study such as cultural and linguistic differences.Chinese EFL learners were found to need more education on the choice of complaint strategies,as they performed similar strategies used by the CNS rather than the ANS.