A Contrastive Analysis Of Judges' Criticism Strategies In Chinese And American Talent Shows

Speech act is one of the most common used ways of communication, which plays an important role in people's life. It is also one of the study focuses for researchers. The previous speech act studies mainly focus on request, apology, compliment and reject, etc. However, the researches on criticism strategies are still inadequate. Criticism is a face threatening speech act. If it is used appropriately, the expected criticism effect can be achieved; if it is misused, the relationship between the speaker and the hearer might be hurt. Therefore, the research on criticism strategy has far-reaching significance.Based on Speech Act Theory, Politeness Theory and Hofstede's Theory of National Cultural Dimension, the paper conducts a contrastive analysis of judges'criticism strategies in Chinese and American talent shows. The data of previous researches on criticism strategies were almost collected through the way of questionnaires. The researchers can obtain a large number of data in a short time by such a way. However, the context of this data is assumed. For lacking of real context, the corpus is not persuasive enough. Based on the self-built closed corpus, which is composed by six episodes in Season 1 of China's Got Talent and seven episodes in Season 3 of America's Got Talent, the paper conducts a contrastive study of judges'criticism strategies in Chinese and American talent shows.17 criticism strategies have been obtained from the self-built corpus, which includes 9 On-record Strategies,8 Off-record Strategies. The judges of China's Got Talent employed 14 criticism strategies among the 17 strategies, and the judges of America's Got Talent adopted 16 criticism strategies. By criticism strategies contrast, it seems that both the Chinese and American talent shows'judges prefer On-record Strategies. But there are big frequency differences between the two parties (the frequency of On-record Strategies adopted by America's Got Talent judges is as high as 80.6%, while the Chinese is 52.1%). After Discussing the similarities and differences of criticism strategies employed in the two shows, the paper presents the interpretation of the similarities and differences of criticism strategies in the following. The study finds that National Cultural Dimension plays a very important role in the interpretation. Nowadays, talent show becomes more and more popular, and the judges' criticism strategies are likely to influence and even to guide the audience how to use criticism strategies. Therefore, the writer hopes to reveal the mystery of criticism strategies to some extent. This paper may contribute to criticism strategies study, cross-cultural study and communication in a certain degree. Of course, this study only touches on contrastive research of criticism strategies, and more aspects about criticism are still waiting for further studies and discussions, such as the response of criticism strategies, etc.