A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Indirect Speech Act In Intercultural Communication

The concept of indirect speech act was first put forward by J. R. Searle in 1975. It refers to"cases in which one illocutionary act is performed indirectly by way of performing another". Since the notion came out, many researchers have conducted various studies on the subject with different approaches. The findings of their researches have been mainly confined to three aspects: grammar, rhetoric, and pragmatics. However, few researchers study indirect speech act from the cross-cultural perspective. Therefore, the writer attempts a contrastive study of indirect speech act between Chinese and English cultures.Although indirect speech act is acknowledged as a universal language device used in daily conversation in every culture, its cultural specificity is sometimes neglected, especially when we are engaged in intercultural communication. By contrasting Chinese and English indirect speech act, the author expects the reader to fully realize the cultural difference of indirect speech act. Moreover, the study goes further to investigate the deep-rooted cultural orientations of English and Chinese cultures, hoping to provide the reader with valuable references concerning the cultural interpretation of indirect speech act.In the dissertation, the writer carries out the study in a systematical way. To begin with, a literature review on indirect speech act is made both at home and abroad. This serves as the historical background of the study. Next, a general survey on indirect speech act is made in detail. The survey covers the definition, motivations, features and classification of indirect speech act. This part enables us to get a comprehensive understanding of indirect speech act, which lays a foundation for further study. Then, the body of the paper is presented. First, based on the relationship between language and culture, the relationship between indirect speech act and culture is discussed. This serves as the theoretical foundation for the contrastive study. Second, the superficial cultural divergences between Chinese and English indirect speech act are illustrated, including cultural conventions, contextual cues and affective implicatures. Third, the investigation on the difference of cultural orientation between the two cultures is carried out. Concerning the cultural orientation, the writer focuses his study on four aspects, i.e. value system, contextual orientation, connotations of face and communication style. Finally the writer presents four cases involving the application of indirect speech act in intercultural communication. In each case, the writer makes a careful analysis on the concrete situation, taking the different cultural orientation into consideration.To sum up, the study of indirect speech act from the cross-cultural perspective has expansive prospects, profound theoretical significance and practical value. It is beyond all doubt that achievements of the contrastive study will be conducive to the linguistic research in future.