Invitations in American English and Mandarin Chinese
With the flourishing of speech act theory in the field of pragmatics, many researchers have endeavored to compare and contrast different speech act realizations either in one culture or across cultures. To date, much of cross-cultural speech act study has been focused on requests, apologies, and compliments, whereas little research has been done on the invitational act. The present study has been motivated by Wolfson's series of studies on American English invitations, and is intended to investigate the similarities and differences in the invitation patterns of speakers of American English and Mandarin Chinese with two research questions in mind: 1) To what extent do native American English and Mandarin Chinese speakers differ in making invitations? 2) To what extent is the use of an initial ambiguous invitation related to the degree of familiarity between the two interlocutors? The data was collected by an open role play technique in which subjects took part in role playing four situations involving invitations, and as distracters, four situations built around other speech acts. The subjects who participated in this study were thirty native speaker of American English and thirty native speakers of Mandarin Chinese from Taiwan. The data was classified on the basis of the categories into which Wolfson subdivided the various invitations in her data. This study tries to make necessary clarifications regarding the definition of an unambiguous invitation, and, in addition, to refine Wolfson's categorization of kernels and leads in light of the role play data. The statistical results drawn from a log-linear analysis with repeated measures indicate that the American English and Mandarin Chinese speakers differ significantly in their preference for some patterns of the unambiguous invitations, i.e., kernels, and ambiguous invitations, i.e., leads, in situations where the degree of familiarity or the type of event differs. The results also show that in both the English and Chinese data, the distribution of the kernel and the lead in a whole discourse differs significantly in the following combinations: 1) the kernel occurs alone in a whole discourse, 2) the lead occurs alone in a whole discourse, and 3) both the kernel and the lead co-occur in a whole discourse, with the lead preceding the kernel. Furthermore, with regard to the unambiguous and ambiguous invitations, the data reveals that both the American and Chinese groups show some tendency to initiate unambiguous invitations between intimates, but to initiate ambiguous invitations between acquaintances. However, only the Americans' use of ambiguous invitations shows a significant strong tendency. Some possible explanations are offered to account for the use of the pseudo-kernel lead type of ambiguous invitation. Pedagogical implications are suggested for language teachers and educators to assist Chinese learners of English in the mastery of English invitations. Finally, limitations of this study and the directions for further research are also discussed.
Teaching English as Second Language, Speech act theory Invitational acts, Cross-cultural comparison, Role play technique
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign