| Recent years have witnessed a booming increase of multidisciplinary studies in linguistics,some of which are concerning the interaction between prosody and pragmatics.The prosody-pragmatics interface study mainly focuses on how an interlocutor uses prosody as a kind of pragmatic resources to achieve his/her communicative goal,which includes the research on the prosodic features of turns,topics,speech acts and discourse markers.There have been more prosodic studies of turns and discourse markers than those of speech acts and topics.The previous prosodic studies of speech acts have the following characteristics:1)most of them-have taken English native speakers as their subjects and few of them have paid attention to L2 English learners;2)most of them have been qualitative studies based on natural conversations and few of them have been quantitative studies which control the syntactic and the contextual factors.This paper takes the quantitative plus qualitative approaches to study Chinese EFL learners' prosodic features of English speech acts.The quantitative approach helps the writer to discover the prosodic differences between L2 Learners and native speakers and the qualitative approach helps her to dig out what may cause the differences.This paper focuses on three constantly-studied speech acts,request,apology and gratitude,and analyzes Chinese EFL learners' prosodic features in both production and perception.In conversations,interlocutors constantly switch between two roles,the speaker and the listener.Therefore it makes great sense to analyze both learners'production and perception of prosody in speech acts.The subjects were 119 Chinese EFL learners in a university,104 of which participated in the quantitative study and 15 in the qualitative study.The data of 4 English native speakers were collected as the reference.In the quantitative study,subjects did the task of situational conversations and took the perception test of prosody.In the qualitative study,subjects fulfilled the English and the Chinese discourse completion tasks(followed by a reflective interview)and took the interview of prosodic perception.The analysis of Chinese EFL learners' prosodic production of speech act expressions has the following findings.First,English native speakers,to make a request,usually weaken the modal verb and the personal pronoun of "Can you X?" and use the rising tone at the end,which indicates the speaker is making a request,while most Chinese EFL learners accentuate the modal verb and/or the personal pronoun and some use the falling tone at the end,which may cause some misunderstanding and construct a wrong communicative identity.Second,English native speakers,to make an apology,usually weaken the personal pronoun of "I'm(so)sorry.",stress the degree adverb and use a flexible sentence-final tone to adapt to the context,while some EFL learners accentuate the personal pronoun,which may cause interactive chaos,and most EFL learners use only the falling tone,which restricts the expression of emotions and attitudes.Third,English native speakers,to express gratitude,usually stress the degree adverb and use a falling tone at the end,while some EFL learners weaken the degree adverb,which may reduce the sincerity of gratitude,and some use a level tone at the end,which may convey an unintended implicature.The analysis of Chinese EFL learners' prosodic perception of speech act expressions has the following findings.First,English native speakers can distinguish between the request and the inquiry of ability according to the prosodic features of "Can you X?",while more than half of the EFL learners cannot do that.Some learners think the requestive "Can you X?"should accentuate the modal verb and the personal pronoun and some think it should use a final falling or a level tone.Second,English native speakers can distinguish between the apology and the request for repetition according to the prosodic features of "I'm sorry.",while half of the EFL learners cannot do that.Some learners think the apologetic "I'm(so)sorry."should use a final level tone.Third,English native speakers can distinguish between the gratitude and the ritual reply according to the prosodic features of "Thank you.",while most of the EFL learners cannot do that.Some learners think the gratitudinal "Thank you(very much)." should emphasize the personal pronoun.Generally speaking,Chinese EFL learners do better in the prosodic perception of speech acts than the prosodic production and there may be some connection between learners' prosodic perception and production.Their acquisition of intonation(the sentence-final boundary tone)is better than that of accent(the pitch accent).They can use prosody most idiomatically in apology and least idiomatically in request.They can use prosody more appropriately in the polite context than in the casual context.The analysis of the factors influencing Chinese EFL learners' prosodic features in speech acts finds that learners' use of prosody is impacted by their accumulation of L2 prosodic knowledge,the prosody of their mother tongue,the distribution of attention(in both oral discourse processing and language learning)and their individual differences.This paper,based on its findings of Chinese EFL learners'prosodic perception,prosodic production,the relationship between perception and production and the factors influencing EFL learners'prosodic features,constructs a model named "L2 Prosodic Acquisition in Speech Acts and its Influencing Factors".The above findings have the following theoretical and practical significance:1)this study demonstrates the important role prosody plays in interaction by analyzing the communicative effect of Chinese EFL learners' prosodic deviation in speech acts,which helps to consolidate the foundation of the prosody-pragmatics interface study;2)it adapts the quantitative plus qualitative approach and advocates the strict control of the syntactic and the contextual factors in the experiment;3)it promotes the idea that prosody should be explained in context and drilled in interaction. |
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