Summary.-This study was designed to examine negative pragmatic transfer of the speech act of English compliments by Chinese who learn English as a foreign language and to estimate the correlation between the amount of negative pragmatic transfer and English proficiency of the Chinese learners. Frequencies of students' performance showed that both in the favored compliments and the response strategies, differences were evident between Chinese English learners and native English speakers. This indicated that Chinese learners had trouble with the "slang" or "idioms" of the target language and tended to transfer negatively their L1 pragmatic norms to their L2 communication. Moreover, the favored compliment response strategies used by two groups of Chinese learners--who had different levels of English proficiency--differed, and negative pragmatic transfer decreased as proficiency in English increased.
The study aims to address Chinese universities’ image repair strategies after network public opinion events in the field of crisis management; therefore, it takes 43 network public opinion events in Chinese universities as the research object, encodes the official texts issued by universities according to the image restoration strategy, and sums up the image repair strategies commonly used by Chinese universities. Then, natural language processing is used to conduct the sentiment analysis of the online comments obtained. Accordingly, the sentiment index is constructed to evaluate the effect of Chinese universities’ image repair strategies. We find that Chinese universities commonly use the image repair strategy combination of bolstering, provocation, and corrective action; they have not used the apology strategy commonly used in western discourse systems. We also find that the complete information release process has a better image repair effect, particularly in teachers’ lapse and personal safety events. The sentiment index in teachers’ lapse events is the highest and is related to the universities’ corrective actions. The sentiment index in different public opinion hot events is quite different, which may be related to the nature of specific events. In personal safety events, netizens are more satisfied with image repair strategies.
A common Chinese addressing practice is to address non-kin people with kinship terms, a phenomenon sometimes
described as ‘kinship term generalization’. Previous studies have mainly focused on the characteristics and functions of kinship
term generalization, confined to certain specific generalized kinship terms (GKTs for short), and limited to GKTs in some Chinese
dialects or certain Chinese literary works. The present study adopts the socio-pragmatic perspective to examine the phenomenon
among Chinese graduate students, a social group not heeded in the literature. Based on the analysis of the data collected, we
argue that Chinese graduate students’ varying use of GKTs in academic settings is a pragmatic strategy, characterized by the
family-centered cultural values of the Chinese society. It is hoped that the present study at the intersection between pragmatics
and sociolinguistics may enrich the study of address forms in general, and in particular of Chinese GKTs.
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