A Pragmatic Study Of Address Forms By Chinese Students Of English

This study investigates the speech act of address performed by Chinese students of English from the perspective of interlanguage pragmatics (ILP). Address forms, as an impressible linguistic phenomenon, have always been the object of sociolinguistic researches. From the angle of pragmatics, address is also a speech act, but few studies consider it a speech act, and few describe the patterns of address behaviour in a speech community. And although various speech acts are investigated in ILP, yet little has been done on the speech act of address performed by L2 learners, especially by Chinese ESL learners. This study is confined to the student community,mainly investigating how Chinese students address their English or foreign teachers, focusing on the description of patterns of their address, and discussing the governing factors and causes for the patterns. Basing on the speech act theory, I defined the speech act of address in a contextual use of proper address forms to express some feelings or achieve some goals. And then the illocutionary forces and pragmatic functions of address are generally discussed. Questionnaire is mainly employed to get the data, and the informants of both lower-proficiency and higher-proficiency are the students from College of Foreign Studies in GXNU. The following findings and conclusions were obtained: (i) Governing factors. The choice of address form is governed by various factors, and the importance degrees of these factors to Chinese students are different from those to native speakers. Among these factors, socio-culture plays an important role. The learners'address is influenced by both English and Chinese cultures. (ii) Pragmatic failure Most Chinese students can follow the generally-accepted rules to address their foreign teachers, using title + last name (TLN) or first name (FN), but still quite a few address teachers with title + first name (TFN), or teacher, neither of which is proper to address a teacher in English culture. This is the phenomenon of pragmatic failure. The illocutionary forces produced through the misuse of address may be misunderstood by foreigners. (iii) Pragmatic transfer Pragmatic failures are caused by two things: one is students'not fully understanding pragmatic rules or norms of address in English, and the other is the influence of Chinese language and culture on English addressing behavior, which is negative pragmatic transfer. Even advanced learners make pragmatic failures in the target language (TL). The study may help enhance Chinese learners'awareness on polite address in crosscultural communication and improve their communicative competence. It hopes to shed light on English language learning and teaching. Foreign language teachers can get implication for their teaching methods, paying more attention on cultural teaching of speech acts.