A Contrastive Study Of Impoliteness Strategies And Its Response Options In China And America

Taking the form of attacking people's face,impoliteness can be used effectively to enhance its perlocutionary act and thus achieve certain communication purposes.In fact,extensive impoliteness strategies are frequently adopted in parent-child interaction.But impoliteness hasn't received widespread attention from scholars in the research on parent-child relationship.The present study is designed to explore the similarities and differences of impoliteness strategies for Chinese parents and American parents and response options for Chinese children and American children and aims to find out the possible factors that may influence these similarities and differences.Two hundred and eighty turns concerning impoliteness between parents and their children from Chinese TV series Kids at Home IV and American TV series Modern Family I-VII were selected as the research subjects of the present study.Then types of impoliteness strategies and response options were marked and counted based on the categorization of Bousfield(2008).Finally impoliteness strategies used by Chinese parents and American parents and response options used by Chinese children and American children were compared and analyzed.The results show that there is a preference for on-record impoliteness strategies over off-record impoliteness strategies for both Chinese parents and American parents.In terms of on-record impoliteness strategies,Americans parents and Chinese parents share some similarities in strategies use including criticism,threaten,etc.Significant differences are found in the use of hindrance and challenge.American parents tend to resort to hindrance,while Chinese parents prefer to adopt challenges.In terms of off-record impoliteness strategies,Chinese parents are inclined to adopt sarcasm and seldom use withhold politeness,which is opposite to American parents.In aspect of response options,both Chinese children and American children tend to respond to the impoliteness performed by parents.As for responses,Chinese children favor to adopt defensive responses,while American children choose these responses less frequently.As for no response,no significance is found for Chinese children and American children.The nature of parent-child relationship,different culture patterns,and unequal power relation or social status between parents and children may attribute to the mentioned results in the present study.The present study enriches the research on impoliteness to some extent,and provides a reference for further research.At the same time,some suggestions for parents are provided in the hope of improving the relationship between parents and children.