An Analysis Of The Pragmatic Functions Of Chinese Pauses And A Research On The Acquisition Of International Students

With the deepening of the pragmatic research on Chinese as a second language,the pragmatic research on rhythm features has gradually entered the field of research.Flexible use of prosody for appropriate social communication is helpful to improve the pragmatic competence of Chinese learners.As one of the main features of prosody,pause should also be taken seriously.At present,the academic research on Chinese pauses is relatively weak and mainly focuses on the study of the form and rule of pauses.There are still differences in the classification of the pragmatic functions of pauses.And there is a lack of systematic research on the performance of Chinese learners’ acquisition of the pragmatic functions of pauses.Based on the theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics,this paper uses the utterances of Chinese native speakers in the talk show "Round Table School" and the oral materials of advanced Chinese learners whose native language is English in "Informal Talks" as corpus sources.Combining the method to investigate the pragmatic function of the Chinese pause and the acquisition situation of foreign students,the following main conclusions are drawn:1.Chinese pauses are divided into 6 pragmatic functions in terms of interpersonal function and discourse function;2.Advanced Chinese learners who are native English speakers can skillfully use the six pause pragmatic functions,but there are also some pause bias,mainly reflected in the two functions of focus and hesitation.3.After the comparison and analysis of the pragmatic functions of Chinese native speakers and learners,it is found that the two groups of people are basically the same in the use of various pragmatic functions of Chinese pauses.However,in the most important function — —highlighting the focus,the Chinese native speakers use the function more frequently,while in the hesitation,politeness,highlighting emotion,humor,discourse and other functions,the overseas students use the function more frequently.4.Negative language transfer is the main factor affecting the pragmatic function bias of foreign students’ Chinese halting,followed by the influence of learners’ learning strategies and communicative strategies,and finally,the lack of attention in teaching and related knowledge in textbooks.At last,the paper puts forward some suggestions on Chinese pause teaching from two aspects: teaching awareness and teaching strategies.