A Cross- Cultural Study On The Apology Response Strategies Of Chinese And American College Students

Since the mid-1970s, with the development of pragmatic theories such as Speech Act Theory, Cooperation Principles and Politeness Principles, many researches have been questioning the cultural universality of these theories. Therefore, cross-cultural comparative studies on cultural differences of communicative norms and speech acts have been the central concerns of pragmatics and inter-cultural communication. Studies on the speech act of apology constitute one of them. Extensive studies on the realization patterns of the speech act of apology and apology strategies in one or many cultural backgrounds have been conducted at home and abroad from the perspective of cross- cultural comparison, native culture transfer and interlanguage transfer. Among these researches, the most influential one is the CCSARP (Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project) conducted by Blum- Kulka & Olshtain (1984) on the two speech acts of apology and request. However, few researchers have probed into the other side of the coin—the speech act of apology responses and response strategies.Based on studies of the speech act of apology, the present research conducts a comparative study on apology responses of native Chinese (NCs) and native Americans (NAs) from the perspective of cross- cultural pragmatics aiming to discover the interactive mechanism between social parameters (social distance and social power) and situational parameters (offense severity and offender's responsibility) and the apology response strategy selections in Chinese and American contexts. Finally, cultural and psychological factors which result in differences and similarities of strategy selection of subjects are investigated.The data used in the present study were collected by means of Discourse Completion Test (DCT) and natural observation so as to remedy the defects of DCT, namely the inauthenticity of the subjects' response. Eighty native Chinese undergraduates and fifty native American undergraduates were selected by systematic sampling to finish the questionnaires. 36 Chinese data and 25 American data are collected for natural observation. Results of Chi-square test show that, according to data of DCT questionnaire, NCs and NAs exhibit significant differences in the use of strategies of cautions, explaining things away, conditional forgiveness, evasion and humorous rejection. Moreover, significant differences are also found in the use of strategies of cautions and conditional forgiveness according to data of natural observation. Spearman correlation tests are conducted to see how social and situational parameters correlate with subjects' strategy selection. Finally, the present study investigates social, cultural factors which result in the differences in subjects' strategy selections. Different from previous studies on speech acts, the present study analyses individual differences in the speech act of apology response in Chinese and in American and finds that the existence of individual differences in each culture is due to self construal of individuals.Results of the study demonstrate that pragmatic principles are universal to some extent and meanwhile subject to different cultural backgrounds. Moreover, individual differences of each cultural community should not be neglected so as to avoid cultural stereotyping to certain extent.