This research studied how English and Chinese speakers encode their criticisms in the media discourse, aiming to explore the correlation between the speakers’ applications of pragmalinguistic strategies and their sociocultural orientations. Criticisms analyzed in the present study were collected from evaluative communications elicited from the US-based talent competitionProject Runwayand the Taiwan-based talent competitionSuper Designer. The current analysis of the face attack act referred to Brown and Levinson’s politeness framework and face notion. The results showed different frequencies of criticizing strategies and redressive devices in the English and Chinese sub-corpora. In addition, the findings also manifested some cross-language variations in pragmalinguistic representation of the same criticizing strategy. The discrepancies were discussed from the perspective of context orientation of the American and Taiwanese societies, evidencing the strong linkage between the speakers’ communication patterns and the cultural norms of their social networks.
This article reports an empirical research into the correlation between adult speakers' communication strategic competence and their language proficiency by comparing Chinese-English bilinguals' application of stalling devices in their L1 and L2 spoken discourse. Dörnyei and Kormos' ((1998). Problem-solving mechanisms in L2 communication. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 20, 349-385) taxonomy of communicative strategies is employed as the analytical framework for the present investigation. The qualitative observations reveal that the general categorical variations of stalling strategy in our participants' L1 and L2 discourse are indistinguishable, manifesting the universality of linguistic communicative strategies. Yet, participants are found to be less proficient at utilizing L2 fillers than the L1 equivalents with respect to variation. Such phenomenon should be greatly attributed to language specificity of the lexicalized stalling devices and the paucity of authentic L2 stimuli the participants received. The quantitative results indicate that the frequency of stalling devices increases along with the decrease of the speakers' automaticity of language processing. Specifically, the frequency of L2 stalling strategies is about two times higher than that of its L1 equivalents. The quantitative results further reinforce that L2 processing is less automatic than L1 processing. In brief, both the qualitative and quantitative findings evidence a tight correlation between the speakers' communication strategic competence and their linguistic proficiency. Finally, some insights into the teaching of non-native stalling strategies for language learners are provided.
A number of pragmatic studies have reported on gender variations in compliment-responding linguistic behavior. However, how people of different gender roles react to compliments was rarely compared. The earlier literature reported that men and women’s values and priorities are incompatible, something which can have a significant impact on their reactions to compliments. The present study, therefore, investigates how people of different gender roles pragmalinguistically respond to different kinds of compliments, such as on appearance, ability, possessions, or personality traits. A discourse completion test, designed to elicit people’s compliment-responding patterns under different scenarios, was then distributed to 600 male and female adult informants. The results showed that the respondents’ reactions to compliments were mostly conditioned by their own gender roles. In addition, the male and female participants’ preferential compliment-responding behaviors were manifestations of the social expectations on masculinity and femininity in their particular speech community.
People’s power and status can be manifested through the language they use. It was generally perceived that men’s speeches are more assertive and direct than women’s because of men’s higher social status in the societies. Yet, studies have argued that there should be no difference in terms of men and women’s linguistic politeness behaviors if they are in the same power position; instead, the addressees’gender is the critical determinant to the addressers’linguistic performances. This research provided some evidence from evaluative communications in TV reality talent shows to further verify whether or not the addressers’ and the addressees’ gender id entities are significantly correlated to the addressers’ linguistic politeness behavior, focusing specifically on their use of mitigating strategies for criticism amelioration. The current analysis referred to Brown and Levinson’s(1987) politeness theory and face notion. Results manifested that it is the addressers’ gender instead of the addressees’ gender that was related to the addressers’ communication style in this particular situational context. Specifically, male judges utilized more mitigating utterances than female judges did. The major implication of the findings is that the functions of politeness devices that speakers perceive and the situational information of the speech context leave greater influences on the addressers’ politeness behavior than the gender of their addressees.
In the existing literature, no attempt has been made to inspect how men and women rhetorically manage their gratitude communications in the academic written discourse. To bridge this knowledge gap, the present article examined how students of different gender construct their thanking acts in the acknowledgements of their M.A. theses. Discrepancies between male and female postgraduates’ employment of linguistic patterns and gratitude themes were compared. The results showed that student writers’ gratitude communications to a certain extent are conditioned by the conventional rhetorical patterns of the academic genre. Remarkable gender variations were evidenced in the students’ selections of lexical items for encoding the thanking expressions, thanking modifiers, and gratitude themes of their acknowledgements. These gender discrepancies in gratitude communications are highly pertinent to the social expectations of masculinity and femininity, the students’ psychological orientations toward the emotion of thanking and their own value priorities.
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