A Contrastive Study Of Pragmatic Strategies Of Greeting And Parting Speech Acts Between China’s Dongxiang Minority Language And Lanzhou Dialect

Up to now, language is the most basic method of communications in our daily life. As a specific language for Dongxiang minority group, Dongxiang Minority Language(DML) carries its nation’s history and culture of the Dongxiang minority.However, DML has become one of the endangered languages which need protection imperatively. In most languages, since greeting and parting are the essential parts for maintaining social relationship between speakers, so they play a significant role in daily communications and interactions. Greeting means the beginning of the conversation while parting indicates its ending. Greeting or parting leads to pragmatic failure and misunderstanding of each other because of different cultures, so it is crucial for speakers to choose the suitable way to convey the meaning they want to express. Furthermore, the speakers should be polite to save the face of each other. In a word, it is important to study speech acts in greeting and parting in two different social backgrounds. The previous research on DML and Lanzhou Dialect(LD)focuses on the perspectives of eco-linguistics and culture whereas this study is primarily based on social pragmatics.The study aims to explore the greeting and parting speech acts from the perspective of social linguistics with a view to investigate the interrelation between politeness and speech acts, and to find out how age and power factors will impact on the greeting and parting speech acts, and to unfold the similarities and differences between DML and LD when speakers adopt greeting and parting strategies.According to the research method of Cross-cultural Speech Act Realization Project(CCSARP) proposed by Blum-Kulka, the thesis combines the quantitative and qualitative methods. The whole research covers situation designs, video recordings,role-plays and questionnaires.The research participants are randomly selected from local Dongxiang people in Wangji Town and Lanzhou dialect speakers from Yuzhong County in Gansu Province.The age of participants ranges from 16 to 70 in Dongxiang and Lanzhou according to the random samples from their respective villages. There are totally 330 participants of both genders including 55 young, 55 middle-aged and 55 elder participants. Finally,300 valid questionnaires are collected from DML, and 312 from LD.The study aims to address four questions:(1) What are the main pragmatic strategies used in DML and LD?(2) How does age difference affect Dongxiang speakers’ choices of greeting and parting strategies?(3) How does power difference affect Dongxiang speakers’ choices of greeting and parting strategies?(4) What are the similarities and differences between the greeting and parting strategies employed by DML and LD speakers?The results indicate that:(1) All greeting and parting strategies are used by participants in DML or LD, but the frequency of each strategy appears significantly different. For instance, the indirect greeting strategy is much more frequently employed in DML than in LD.(2) The study findings reveal that age factors affect the greeting and parting strategies of Dongxiang speakers. For instance, in DML, old speakers tend to use concern strategy to greet while young speakers use phaticcommunication.(3) Power factors affect Dongxiang speakers’ choices of greeting and parting strategies. For example, alerters are used more frequently by the weaker-powered speakers than those of the stronger-powered speakers. There exist significant differences between them when performing direct and indirect greeting.(4)Both differences and similarities of greeting and parting speech acts exist between the DML and LD. The study analyzes the differences from the perceptive of social pragmatics and politeness principles.