A Study Of Speech Acts In The Dialogues Of The Joy Luck Club: An Intercultural Perspective

We are living in a verbal world and have to perform differentkinds of speech acts all the time. Because of the cultural differences,more often than not, the misunderstanding and conflict may arise inintercultural communication. As a result, the speech act has long beenone of the significant research projects of linguists and sociolinguists.However, through the review of the present research situation, we findthat most of researches are implemented by adopting the way ofquestionnaire survey to acquire the study materials, such as DCT andMCQ. This thesis tries to adopt a new approach to do research, that is,trying to collect natural dialogue materials from Amy Tan’s classicfiction-The Joy Luck Club, together with the specific context of eachspeech act.The author selects a lot of dialogues from The Joy Luck Club,these cases are classified into different categories according to speechact theory, then using intercultural theory to analyze each speech actwhile the factors of politeness and face are taken into account. Thisthesis specially explores four formulaic speech acts: addressing, refusals,compliments and requests. Firstly, it makes a basic analysis andoverview of the speech act on the basis of Austin and Searle’s SpeechAct Theory. Then it provides the specific discourse and situationalcontexts of each speech act, attempting to achieve the true andnatural of the material. Next, the author employs Hall’s low-context andhigh-context communication and Hofstede’s model of culturaldimension (collectivism and individualism, power distance and timeorientation) to make qualitative analysis of each speech act. That iswhy do people from different cultural backgrounds are inclined tomake this speech act to achieve their communicative purpose, why dothey adopt these strategies and make these reactions. This thesis aims to compare and analyze the differences ofmaking speech acts between Americans and Chinese. Through theanalysis of these differences the language characteristics of theimportance characters in the fiction can be well demonstrated, namely,the language characteristics of the Chinese traditional culturerepresented by mothers and the American culture represented bydaughters. In a word, language is a mirror of social culture, it can wellreflect a nation’s cultural characteristics. Therefore, understandingother countries’ culture can effectively avoid misunderstanding, reduceconflicts in intercultural communication, and strengthen the mutualunderstanding between each other eventually.