A Comparative Study Of The Speech Act Of Warning Between Chinese College Students And Australian College Students

In recent years, within the theoretical framework of the speech act established by Austin and Searle, many scholars both at home and abroad have carried out relevant studies on specific speech acts such as complaining, requesting, compliments and refusals. However, the speech act of warning, to some degree, is less studied in the field of pragmatics, not to mention the comparative study of this speech act.This thesis is a comparative study of the speech act of warning between Chinese college students and Australian college students. A systematic investigation is done from the perspective of realization patterns of warning, strategies employed by the college students to achieve their ultimate goal in the actualization of the speech act of warning, and effects of social variables on the realization patterns of warning and the strategies used in two countries.This study adopts both a quantitative approach and a qualitative approach. Based on the results of observation sheets provided by10Chinese college students and10Australian college students, the questionnaires are designed to collect data from altogether80freshmen, of whom40subjects are from Hefei University and another40are from University of South Australia.Through careful analysis, the author finds out that an overwhelming majority of Chinese and Australian college students choose to elicit warnings in the given situations. There exist similarities and differences in the distribution of the realization patterns of warning in the Chinese and English contexts. It is found that students from two countries use the pattern of "only the head act" most frequently. The next commonly applied pattern is the "the microunit+the head act". However, more Chinese subjects choose to use the pattern of "the microunit+the head act+the auxiliary act" and the pattern "only the microunit" is only employed by English speakers. Besides, five commonly used strategies are also generalized. The statistical results show that although both the Chinese subjects and Australian subjects use the strategy of "explicit warning" most frequently, more Chinese college students apply the strategies of "use of advisory or explanatory utterance" and "hint" than their Australian counterparts. Finally, two social variables, social distance and relative power, have been taken into consideration. It is found that there are significant differences in the choices of realization patterns and strategies made by the Chinese subjects and Australian subjects no matter which social variable exists.The present study can enrich our knowledge of the speech act of warning and guide us to find the most suitable way to communicate with others and thus keep us from making pragmatic failures in daily interaction. Besides, this comparative study can strengthen the cultural awareness of English learners and improve their intercultural communicative competence. Finally, this study can provide some insights into the cross-cultural communication and language teaching.This thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter1gives a brief introduction to the present study. Chapter2introduces the previous studies on the speech act of warning. Chapter3reviews the related theories serving as the theoretical background of the study. Chapter4focuses on the methodological issues of this study. Chapter5is reserved for the detailed analysis of the data collected. In the last chapter, a conclusion is drawn and the limitations of the study are pointed out for the sake of further research.