英汉称赞语跨文化语用特征分析

英汉称赞语的跨文化语用特征分析

【摘要】恭维语作为一种表达的言语行为是一种普遍的社会语言现象, 然而在英汉文化中它们有着各自不同的表达方式。本文通过深入地分析五组对应关系的本土化英汉恭维语及其答语的异同,

探究了中英跨文化交际方面的语用差异, 并且提出了5条行之有效的防止学生出现跨文化语用失误的教学策略,希望对其它英语教师有所裨益。

【关键词】跨文化语用学恭维语及其答语教学策略

on a cross-cultural pragmatic analysis of compliments in english and chinese

zhang mei

【abstract】compliments as an expressive speech act are a universal social-linguistic phenomenon; however they have their own expressive ways in american and chinese culture respectively. this paper mainly probes into such

cross-cultural pragmatic differences by analyzing five groups of parallel dialogues about how native speakers giving and responding to compliments in american and chinese own cultures. five effective teaching tips to avoid students’cross-cultural pragmatic failure are given afterwards.

hopefully, it is helpful to other english teachers.

【key words】ccp, compliments and responses, teaching tips

1.background theory

pragmatics is defined by yule (1996) as “the study of the relationships between linguistic forms and the users of those forms” (p. 4), in other words, it is the study of meaning derived from context, dealing with particular utterances in particular situations (richards & rodgers, 1986). and the part dealing with cross-cultural interaction is usually termed “cross-cultural pragmatics” (clyne, 1994). kasper and blum-kulka (1993) define cross-cultural pragmatics (ccp) as the study of linguistic acts performed by language users with different cultural backgrounds.

one area that has contributed immensely to cross-cultural pragmatics is speech acts. austin (1962) initiated speech act theory, with the belief of “saying something will often, or even normally, produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons” (p.101)

this paper will narrow the scope down to one particular expressive speech act of compliments and try to examine how complicated and confusing such speech act is in the

cross-cultural contexts.

2.examples and discussion

with the major function of establishing and maintaining social “rapport”(manes & wolfson, 1981:124) and smoothness between participants, compliments are positive expression or evaluation directed to someone for something valued positively by the speaker and the hearer, and even the whole speech community (holmes, 1986; ye, 1995). it can be expressed either explicitly or implicitly according to different contexts and different cultures, thus, this section will focus on diversities of such a culturally-constrained speech act- compliments, made by americans and chinese respectively and a discussion of the causes to these similarities and differences will be given afterwards.

five groups of parallel dialogues are typical examples about how native speakers giving and responding to compliments in american and chinese own cultures.

group 1:

example 1: (american way)

a: you did a good job

b: thank you. (yang & li, 2001: 86)

example 2:(chinese way)

a: 我要能像你那么能干就好了。