A DCT Survey Of Pragmatic Transfer In Apology Strategies By Chinese Learners Of English

The study of speech acts has long been regarded as one of the central concerns of pragmatics, especially interlanguage pragmatics. The speech act of apology is one of them. Based on the theoretical framework of interlanguage pragmatics and the speech act of apology, this thesis endeavours to make a study of speech act of apology to describe and analyze the selection of apology strategies by Chinese learners of English at various levels of linguistic proficiency, as compared with that of the native American speakers and the native Chinese speakers. Meantime the learners' pragmatic transfer is under investigation. Four groups answered two types of questionnaires. One type of questionnaire is called Discourse Completion Test (DCT for short) including eight situations, and the other is designed to assess such socio-pragmatic factors as social distance, social power, severity of offence and obligation of apology. Chi-squire tests were conducted to examine the pragmatic differences in strategy selection among the four groups. Spearman correlation tests were conducted to investigate how the socio-pragmatic factors are correlated with the choice of apology strategies.The findings are that there are some similarities and differences among the four groups as far as the strategy selection is concerned. The similarities are that the strategies...