| The present study is an empirical study on the oral invitation-response speech act from an intercultural communication perspective. By examining the previous studies about invitation speech acts, the author finds that few researcher has shed light on Chinese and American invitation speech act in intercultural area, therefore, the author chooses this topic with the aims of investigating the similarities and differences between linguistic realization patterns and strategies of Chinese and English oral invitation and its response, as well as the effect of social variables on the choice of inviting strategies in Chinese and English context. The findings of this research may somehow enhance the successful intercultural communication in invitation-response speech act.Altogether, this paper consists of seven parts. The first two chapters present a brief introduction and a literature review of the present study about invitation in China and abroad. Chapter three lists the theoretical framework supporting this empirical study. Chapter four focuses on the research methodology. Hereafter, the linguistic data are analyzed and discussed in chapter five and chapter six. The last chapter winds up the whole thesis and elicits the implication and limitation of the current study.The whole thesis gets its theoretical support from Austin and Searle s speech act theory (Austin,1962 Searle,1975), Leech s (1983) politeness principles, Brown and Levinson s(1978,1987) politeness theory and Gu Yueguo s (1990) Chinese politeness principles. The research methods is the quantitative study. Interview Sheet and the revised DCT questionnaires are adopted as instruments to be distributed to 50 Chinese and 50 American subjects respectively to collect the relevant linguistic data.Hereafter, the author analyzes the linguistic data at two levels and gets the following findings: at the conversational level, Chinese have various sequential patterns like single pattern, bipartite pattern and tripartite pattern while Americans only have the single pattern as their typical invitation-response structure; at the sentential level, the strategies of each culture are summarized under the semantic formulas: pre-invitation, core invitation, acceptance and refusal. The linguistic data from DCT questionnaire are entered into computer for statistical analysis. The results reveal that social variables like social distance, relative power and rank of imposition affect people s choice on core-inviting strategies both in Chinese and American contexts. In addition, significant differences are found to exist in some strategies employed in the semantic formulas of pre-invitation, core invitation, acceptance and refusal between the two cultural contexts. Such differences can be accounted for by cultural differences. |
