Pragmatic Transfer In Chinese College EFL Learners' Compliment Responses

This thesis presents a study of pragmatic transfer in the speech act of compliment response (CR) strategies among Chinese college EFL learners in an attempt to reveal the distinctive features of pragmatic transfer. CRs of native Chinese and Americans are provided for a comparison to illustrate how Chinese EFL learners reflect their mother tongue behavior in responding to a compliment in English.Three groups of subjects are selected. 33 native Chinese speakers from one class majoring in computer science make up Group One, 75 Chinese college EFL learners from three classes majoring in computer science form Group 2 and Group Three consists of 24 native Americans from the U.S. All the subjects in Group One and Two are sophomores in NWPU (Northwestern Polytechnical University). Group Two is further subdivided into three subgroups according to the English proficiency level of the subjects. The data for this study are collected through an effective instrument in interlanguage pragmatics: Discourse Completion Task (DCT). Yu's DCT questionnaire (1999) in which eight compliment situations are given with gender and social status as contextual variables is used as reference. Subjects' responses are categorized into different strategies based on Herbert's (1986) taxonomy and descriptive analysis is conducted to find out their pragmatic features in their CRs respectively. By comparison, Chinese college EFL learners' pragmatic transfer in their interlanguage realization of CR are presented and discussed in detail.The results show that there is an increasing tendency for native Chinese to accept a compliment nowadays, although Chinese still decline a compliment in many situations. Chinese college EFL learners reflect their mother tongue behavior of CRs in their interlanguage, i.e. pragmatic transfer, both pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic is detected. This is especially true when contextual factors of gender and status are considered. Furthermore, there is no direct relationship between pragmatic transfer and pragmatic failure.