| 英文摘要 |
Cross-cultural pragmatics research on American and Chinese complimenting behaviors has focused primarily on use of different strategies for various functions, topics, and speaker-hearer relationships. However, in addition to strategies, content (what to say) and form (how to say it) play an inevitable and significant role in cross-cultural speech act performance. This study aims to analyze how native speakers of American English perceive the content and form produced by Chinese speakers when giving and responding to compliments in English. In-depth explanations are provided from both sociolinguistic and cognitive linguistic perspectives. Two discourse completion tasks (DCTs) were designed to elicit responses from American speakers in the United States and Chinese speakers of English in Taiwan. These samples were assessed and commented on by 20 American assessors, who were in-service teachers in an MA TESOL program in the United States. Content analysis of assessor comments indicated that eight types of content problems were perceived by American assessors: Improper amount of information, Nonsensical exchanges, Rudeness, Overstatement, No acknowledgement, No answer to the question, No compliment, and Wrong person/thing complimented. Furthermore, four types of form problems were perceived by the American assessors, including problems with phrasing, grammar, word choice, and alerters. From an American standpoint, these problems represent violations of Grice’s (1975) Conversational Maxims and Brown & Levinson’s (1987) Politeness Principles. A critical reflection on what stance Chinese speakers of American English take when performing compliment exchanges is also offered in this paper to provide plausible explanations for their utterances. |
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