Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Research background
Language transfer has always been a productive topic in language research and there aremany relevant theories, such as Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (Lado, 1957, quoted fromLiu, 2012). Notwithstanding the prolific production of this area, scholars such as Kasper(1992), put emphasis on the pragmatic transfer of L1 (the first language or native language) toL2 (the second language), while the pragmatic backward transfer (L2 to L1) doesn’t receiveas much attention as the former one.As a speech act, compliments have been much studied and there are a number of scholars,such as Holmes (1988), who researched on compliments in New Zealand, Herbert (1990),Chen (1993) and so on. Compliments have been called “social lubricants” and Pomerantz(1978) claims that accepting a compliment graciously is the implicit ideal in American culture(p. 80). According to Holmes (1988), there are many functions of compliments in people’sinteraction, for example, solidarity signals, cementing friendships, attenuating demands,smoothing ruffled feathers and bridging gaps created by possible offense, moreover, malestend to regard compliments as face threat acts while females would be more likely treatcompliments as a positive politeness device (p. 464). Besides, some other scholars put theirfocus on gender difference in compliment responses, such as Ye (1995), Quan (2004), andSun (2006). These scholars are of the opinion that there are many dissimilarities between menand women compliment responses that men tend to ignore or evade others’ complimentswhile women prefer to accept others’ compliments and compliment others. Moreover, somestudies combine one certain speech act with varied English proficiency to carry outcontrastive experiments, such as Li (2005), Lu (2009), Liu (2012), and Hou (2014).
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1.2 Research purpose and significance
The purpose of this thesis is to explore the English proficiency and gender differences ofthe pragmatic backward transfer on the compliment responses.If this thesis could find the answers, firstly, a better understanding of pragmaticbackward transfer can be achieved, hence, a development of pragmatic transfer study can alsobe improved; secondly, researches on pragmatic backward transfer might obtain moreattention from language researchers and thus language workers could pay more attention tolanguage teaching and also the relationship between language and culture; thirdly, pragmatictransfer study can make researchers further think about the relationship between language,mind, gender, and even society.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
This chapter is devoted to literature review. First come the definitions about pragmatictransfer, then related researches are presented, including literature on pragmatic transfer bothfrom L1 to L2 and from L2 to L1, pragmatic backward transfer on compliments andcompliment responses, and also researches on gender difference.
2.1 Pragmatic transfer
Pragmatic transfer is a language phenomenon. In the beginning, it is language transfer,not pragmatic transfer, that has attracted many scholars’ attention. Odlin (1989) claims that“transfer is the influence resulting from similarities and differences between the targetlanguage and any other language that has been previously (and perhaps imperfectly)acquired” (p. 27). With the study of language transfer going further, scholars gradually realizethat language transfer not only occurs at the level of phonetics, phonology, semantics, syntaxand ect, but also at the pragmatic level. Therefore, since the late 1970s, when pragmatics hasbecome an independent subject of linguistic study, linguists have begun to do research onlanguage transfer from the pragmatic perspective. However, the absolutely exact definition ofpragmatic transfer doesn’t exist as linguists disagreed with each other on how to define thescope of pragmatic, so there are many definitions of pragmatic transfer.Wolfson (1989) defined “pragmatic transfer” as “the use of rules of speaking from one’sown speech community when interacting with members of host community or simply whenspeaking or writing in a second language is known as sociolinguistic or pragmatic transfer ”(p. 141). In Wolfson’s opinion, sociolinguistic may be equivalent to pragmatic so that thesetwo terminologies can be used interchangeably.Beebe et al. (1990) defined “pragmatic transfer” as “transfer of L1 socioculturalcompetence in performing L2 speech acts or any other aspects of L2 conversation where thespeaker is trying to achieve a particular function of language” (p. 96).Kasper (1992) clarified the concept of pragmatic transfer. According to Kasper,“Pragmatic transfer in interlanguage pragmatics shall refer to the influence exerted bylearners’ pragmatic knowledge of languages and cultures other than L2 on theircomprehension, production and learning of L2 pragmatic information” (p. 207).
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2.2 Backward transfer
Compared with pragmatic transfer, backward transfer is an emerging topic, whicharoused linguists’ interests recently. Although the concept of “backward transfer” has beenput forward for more than 30 years, to data, the number of related literature is not as much asthe former one and at the same time, it probably seems that backward transfer may not getresearchers’ enough attention compared with pragmatic transfer. However, there are alsosome linguists who devoted themselves to defining it or conducting related research. And thefollowing sections will present the definition of backward transfer and also some previousresearches.With the development of pragmatic research, some linguists became to realize thelanguage phenomenon of backward transfer, and they started to define it from differentperspectives.Weinreich (1953) pointed out in his book Language in Contact that “those instances ofdeviation from the norms of either language which occur in the speech of bilinguals as a resultof their familiarity with more than one language ” (p. 1), which might be probably the earliestdescription of backward transfer.According to Jakobovit (1970), the phenomenon that L2 can affect the use of L1 isnamed “backlash interference”, which might be the first definition of backward transfer.In 1988, Thomson and Kaufman pided language transfer into two different kinds,borrowing transfer and substratum transfer. Borrowing transfer is equal to backward transferto some extent because borrowing transfer means that the second language one has learnedcan exert some influence on the former acquired language which usually is the nativelanguage.
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Chapter Three Theoretical Framework ........ 17
3.1 Multi-competence theory........ 17
3.1.1 Definition of multi-competence ........ 17
3.1.2 Integration continuum ..... 18
3.1.3 Model of bilingual’s language system ....... 19
3.2 Leech’s Politeness Principle ............ 20
3.3 Summary...... 22
Chapter Four Methodology ........ 23
4.1 Research questions......... 23
4.2 Subjects........ 23
4.3 Instrument .... 23
4.4 Procedure ..... 24
4.4.1 Pilot study...... 24
4.4.2 Main study..... 24
4.5 Summary...... 25
Chapter Five Results and Discussion ........... 26
5.1 Results.......... 26
5.2 Discussion.... 37
5.2.1 On Question 1......... 37
5.2.2 On Question 2......... 40
5.3 Summary...... 42
Chapter Five Results and Discussion
This chapter includes two parts as one is results and the other is analysis. In the resultssection, outcomes of the empirical research would be presented at length by means of tablesand also related description, while in analysis, some possible reasons would be put forward asan explanation for these informants’ respective habits of language use in terms of complimentresponses.
5.1 Results
In the following section, an overview of compliment response strategies would be shownfirstly and then follow detailed data analysis of response strategies to various complimenttopics and gender difference. The category of compliment response strategies takes Yu’s(2003, 2004) version (detailed categorization see Chapter 2), including acceptance,amendment, non-acceptance, face relationship related response, combination and noacknowledgment. Due to the limited space, all these strategies need to be abbreviated asfollows: accep., amend., non-accep., face re., combin., and no ack. Besides, advancedmales/females are equal to advanced English proficiency males/females and low males/females equal to low English proficiency males/females.As for low male group, amendment strategy covers more than 60% with overwhelmingsuperiority compared with other response strategies as it has been adopted by 270 times.Acceptance strategy is the second choice due to 67 times and 16.75% even though thefrequency is much lower than amendment strategy. The rate of combination strategy is 14.5%,58 times used. Non-acceptance strategy has been used 4 times and coves 1% and the last is noacknowledgment strategy, which is used only once and covers 0.25%. Besides, no one in lowmale group adopts face relationship related response. Low female informants take advantageof amendment strategy 220 times, covering 55.14% and being far ahead than the frequency ofother strategies, which is similar to the condition of low male group’s choose on amendmentstrategy. However, different from low male group, low female group regards combinationstrategy as the second response strategy with 26.82% and then is acceptance strategy with17.29%. In addition, low female group utilizes face relationship related response twice whilethe other three groups don’t use this strategy at all. Among these strategies low female groupused, non-acceptance strategy is the last choice which occupies 0.25%.
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Conclusion
This chapter is the final section of the whole thesis. At first, a brief summary of theresearch content will be presented and then is major findings, significance and limitations ofthe thesis.This thesis has managed to combine pragmatic backward transfer, English proficiency,and gender difference on compliment responses together and conduct an empirical research tofind out whether gender difference exists in pragmatic backward transfer on the complimentresponses of language learners with varied English proficiency. Under the guidance of Cook’smulti-competence theory and also Leech’s Politeness Principle, this thesis implemented anempirical study by utilizing the DCT questionnaire to collect data. There were 5 complimentsituations and compliment topics maintained “possession”, “achievement”, “appearance”,“performance”, and “character”. As for informants, all advanced English informants arepostgraduates in Xihua University while low English informants are freshmen in SichuanTOP IT Vocational Institute and sample size of each group is 80 persons with 40 males and40 females respectively.
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References (abbreviated)