Cross Cultural Speech Act Realization Project Marketing Essay
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Transcript of Cross Cultural Speech Act Realization Project Marketing Essay
Cross Cultural Speech Act Realization Project Marketing Essay
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Introduction
In order to prove whether South Asian people talk impolitely, it is
important to understand how they communicate with others. We will
focus our research on how South Asians make requests in their everyday
communication. In fact, making requests is a kind of face threatening act,
the speaker will put pressure on the hearer. In order to mitigate the
degree of imposition, the speaker needs to use different politeness
strategies. By examining the requests made by South Asian teenagers,
we can come up with an answer to our propose question. In addition, we
will evaluate an interview with a school principal whose students are
mostly South Asians in order to justify our findings.
Literature Review
Speech Act Theories
Speech acts are prevailing theories in pragmatics. There are many
different types of speech acts, for example, questions, requests, offers
and so on. According to Austin (1975) and Searle (1976), people use
languages to achieve different kinds of purposes. They believe that a
variety of acts are performed in speech. For Austin (1975), he
emphasizes on how speaker realize their intentions in speaking. On the
other hand, Searle (1976) pays attention to the responses of hearers to
utterances. There have been many speech acts studies carried out in the
past, their aim is to give illocutors a clear picture on how to perform
effectively in communications.
Politeness Theories
The concept of politeness was introduced by Goffman. He mentioned
about the importance of protecting the faces of both speakers and
hearers (1955, 1967). Leech (1987) also highlights the elements of social
power and social distance in interlocutions between the speaker and the
hearer. In general, the greater distance between the two, the more tact
should be employed by the speaker. The Politeness Principle has another
function, that is to maintain a friendly relationship and cooperation
among interlocutors. Later, Brown and Levinson (1978) introduce two
concepts regarding politeness, namely positive face and negative face.
Positive face is about the importance of begin accepted and admired
while negative face focuses on the need to be independent with being
imposed by others. Thus, speakers should try to avoid giving offense to
hearers when communicating.
Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP)
Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project was initiated by
Blum-Kulka. According to Blum-Kulka (1982), request strategies in all
languages consist of three levels of directness. Each level can then be
further divided into nine levels of increasing indirectness. Blum-Kulka
and House (1989) further investigates requesting behavior, in which the
relative importance of power, social distance, situational setting and
degree of imposition differ across cultures and languages. The
researchers have studied American English, Canadian French, Hebrew,
Argentinian, Spanish, Russian, German and Thai (Rosina 2000). As other
researchers later expanded their investigation into languages like
Chinese, Taiwanese and Japanese. In order to explore the way of making
requests by South Asian youth, our research will include analysis for both
local Chinese and South Asian teenagers. One special feature about our
study is that both groups of teenagers are being analyze under their L2
rather than their L1.
The following research questions are to be examined:
Are South Asian teenagers impolite in speech?
Can South Asian teenagers employ different request strategies?
Why are South Asian people thought to be impolite in speech?
3. Methodology
3.1 Informants
The informants are 10 teenagers from two ethnic groups. With five
local Chinese students in one group and five South Asian students in
another. The students in both groups aged about 14 to 18 years. The
target group are composed of South Asian students coming from
countries like India, Pakistan and Philippines. The personal information
regard the students in the target group are shown in Table 1. The other
group consists of only local Chinese students. In order to obtain validated
results from our research, the students in both groups come from the
same Form and similar banding schools. In addition, both groups of
students are proficient L2 learners of English. Therefore, they should be
able to complete the survey questions without problems.
South Asian teenagers
Age
Sex
L1
Years of learning L2
16
F
Hindi
13
16
M
Tagalog
11
17
F
Hindi
14
17
F
Nepali
14
18
F
Tagalog
15
Table 1. Background information of the students in target group.
3.2 Data Processing
This is a cross-sectional and experimental study of a group of South
Asian teenagers. The data in this experiment is collected by means of
Dialogue Completion Task (DCT). DCT is one of the most widely used
methods in pragmatics and it involves a series of controlled elicitation
procedures. There are several advantages in using DCT in our research:
1. It helps to create 'an initial classification of semantic formulas and
strategies that will occur in natural speech.' (Beebe, as cited in Wouf,
2006, p.1460)
2. It is a less time-consuming method to collect and process data
3. It enables the researcher to collect the record of what people think
they
would say.
The DCT used in this research has been modified. The twelve situations
have been created based on students' experiences at school, at home and
at work. Also, the modified version of DCT does not include any response
of the hearer because of two reasons:
The presence of the hearer's response would somehow affect how the
participants give responses to the situation (Rintell & Mitchell, 1989).
The range of participants' responses will be limited and thus affect the
validity of the research.
Since the twelve situations given in the survey are familiar contexts to
the target students, they will be able to use their background knowledge
to complete the survey questions. The survey was conducted in a
classroom. The targeted students were given a DCT questionnaire with
twelve social situations. They were given a period of thirty minutes to
complete the survey without supervision.
The twelve situations in our questionnaire are designed based on the
three contextual and social variables as suggested by Brown and
Levinson in their politeness theory. According to Brown and Levinson
(1987), 'relative power' (P), 'social distance' (D) and 'absolute ranking'
(R) of imposition are the three independent variables in 'face threatening
acts'. Relative power refers to the power difference between the speaker
and the hearer. Social distance means whether the speaker and the
hearer are close in relationship. Absolute ranking of imposition
represents the severity of offence to the hearer. Politeness usually
involves high P, D and R so that the action of making request will be less
imposing to the hearer. In order to improve the accuracy of our research,
comprehensive data from the twelve situations should be obtained. The
twelve situations are listed it Table 2.
Relative Power (P)
Social Distance (D)
Absolute Ranking
of imposition (R)
equal status hearer (S = H)
+ SD
High
higher status hearer (S < H)
- SD
Low
lower status hearer (S > H)
* S refers to the speaker
* H refers to the hearer
* +SD refers to the situations where the social distance between the hearer and the speaker is far,
vice versa for -SD
* High absolute ranking means the request is very imposing and low ranking means less imposing
Table 2. The three variables in the 12 situations.
To make the comparison and analysis more systematically, the twelve
situations are grouped together when the three variables concerned are
more or less the same. Then, there are six categories in total. The
situations are arranged randomly so that the informants are unaware of
what is expected in the research. Therefore, it is hoped that the
responses can be natural and accurate. The twelve situations grouped
into six categories are shown in Table 3.
Category
1
2
3
4
5
6
Situation
1
3
4
8
2
6
9
11
5
7
10
12
( P )
S=H
S=H
S=H
S=H
S<H
S<H
S<H
S<H
S>H
S>H
S>H
S>H
( D )
+SD
+SD
-SD
-SD
+SD
+SD
-SD
-SD
+SD
+SD
-SD
-SD
( R )
Low
Low
High
High
High
High
Low
High
Low
Low
High
High
Table 3. The twelve situations categorized according to the three
variables.
In the questionnaire, there are four situations each for hearer with
higher (S<H), lower (S>H) or equal (S=H) status as the speaker. The
situations are designed with seven scenarios involving a high social
distance (+SD) and five scenarios with a low social distance.
Furthermore, there are six scenarios involving a high degree of
imposition and another six scenarios involving low degree of imposition.
In order to find out whether South Asian teenagers are really less polite
than the local Chinese students, both of their sociolinguistic and
pragmalinguistic competence are evaluated. The data are analyzed
according to the coding system of two different frameworks, namely
(CCSARP) adopted by Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989) and the
'Five Stages of L2 Request Development' suggested by Achiba (2002) and
Ellis (1992). As mentioned before, our research will take the 'Five stages
of L2 Request Development' into account in order to examine whether
the English proficiency of the informants would affect the way they make
requests. The framework of CCSARP and the 'Five Stages of L2 Request
Development' are summarized in Appendix B and C.
As a way of analyzing the data obtained, the percentage is calculated
with the number of cases using the specific strategy (from CCSARP) over
the total number of responses in each category. In addition, mitigating
devices are also analyzed in this study as they are effective tools to soften
the degree of imposition. The percentage of mitigating devices used is
calculated by dividing the total number of mitigating devices used in all
scenarios over the total number of responses.
4. Findings
4.1 Request Strategies
Table 4 shows that all South Asian and local Chinese students all used
strategy 7 when asking a stranger the way to a fast food restaurant or
asking for time. Strategy 7 is usually employed to reduce the level of
directness when making a request as shown in Appendix B.
Situation:
1. Ask a stranger the way to a fast food restaurant
3. Ask a strange the time
Strategy
South Asian
Local Chinese
Frequency
%
Frequency
%
1. Mood Derivable
0
0
0
0
2.Explicit Performative
0
0
0
0
3.Hedged Performative
0
0
0
0
4.Locution Derivable
0
0
0
0
5. Want Statement
0
0
0
0
6.Suggestory Formula
0
0
0
0
7. Preparatory
10
100
10
100
8. Strong Hint
0
0
0
0
9. Mild Hint
0
0
0
0
Table 4
Tabel 5 indicates that 90% of the South Asian students use strategy 7
and 60% of the Chinese students adopt the same strategy when they
need to ask their friend to borrow a pen, or they need to ask their friend
for permission to use their computer. Other than strategy 7, 10% of
South Asian students and 20% of Chinese students also employed
strategy 1, which is the most direct strategy to make a request.
Situation:
4. Ask a friend to borrow his pen.
8. Ask a friend for permission to use his computer
Strategy
South Asian
Local Chinese
Frequency
%
Frequency
%
1. Mood Derivable
1
10
2
20
2.Explicit Performative
0
0
0
0
3.Hedged Performative
0
0
0
0
4.Locution Derivable
0
0
0
0
5. Want Statement
0
0
0
0
6.Suggestory Formula
0
0
0
0
7. Preparatory
9
90
8
80
8. Strong Hint
0
0
0
0
9. Mild Hint
0
0
0
0
Table 5
Table 6 depicted that most students in the two groups use strategy 7 in
situation 2,6 and 11. About 33.3% of the Chinese students use strategy 8,
which is an indirect strategy to reduce the level of directness and the
weight of imposition. In addition, there are about 6.7% of South Asian
students and 13.3% Chinese students used the most direct way to make a
request, or strategy 1.
Situation:
2. Ask your father for money to buy a pair of new shoes
6. Ask a teacher to help you with a math question
11. Ask the manager for a day off
Strategy
South Asian
Local Chinese
Frequency
%
Frequency
%
1. Mood Derivable
1
6.7
2
13.3
2.Explicit Performative
0
0
0
0
3.Hedged Performative
0
0
0
0
4.Locution Derivable
0
0
0
0
5. Want Statement
2
13.3
0
0
6.Suggestory Formula
0
0
0
0
7. Preparatory
12
80
8
53.3
8. Strong Hint
0
0
5
33.3
9. Mild Hint
0
0
0
0
Table 6
Table 7 shows us that when students need to ask the class monitors to
hand out workbooks, most South Asian students (80%) and Chinese
students (90%) use strategy 7. However, a couple of South Asian
students do prefer to use the most direct strategy to talk to their peers.
Situation:
9. Ask the class monitors to hand out workbooks
Strategy
South Asian
Local Chinese
Frequency
%
Frequency
%
1. Mood Derivable
2
40
0
0
2.Explicit Performative
0
0
0
0
3.Hedged Performative
0
0
0
0
4.Locution Derivable
0
0
0
0
5. Want Statement
0
0
0
0
6.Suggestory Formula
0
0
0
0
7. Preparatory
3
60
5
100
8. Strong Hint
0
0
0
0
9. Mild Hint
0
0
0
0
Table 7
Table 8 represents what the students used in situation 5 and 7. All South
Asian students chose to use strategy 7 while only 70% of the Chinese
students use this strategy. Then, 30% of the Chinese students use
strategy 1 and 5, meaning they make request more direct.
Situation:
5. Ask the store owner to get a product for a closer look
7. Ask a lower form classmate to decorate the classroom
Strategy
South Asian
Local Chinese
Frequency
%
Frequency
%
1. Mood Derivable
0
0
2
20
2.Explicit Performative
0
0
0
0
3.Hedged Performative
0
0
0
0
4.Locution Derivable
0
0
0
0
5. Want Statement
0
0
1
10
6.Suggestory Formula
0
0
0
0
7. Preparatory
10
100
7
70
8. Strong Hint
0
0
0
0
9. Mild Hint
0
0
0
0
Table 8
Table 9 shows the results obtained in situation 10 and 12. With about
80% of the South Asian students and 70% of the Chinese students employ
strategy 7. Furthermore, about 30% of the Chinese students chose to use
the most direct strategies to talk to younger relatives. On the other hand,
there are 20% of the South Asian students used the most direct strategy.
Situation:
10. Ask your sister to borrow her Mp3 player
12. Ask your younger cousin to borrow his digital camera
Strategy
South Asian
Local Chinese
Frequency
%
Frequency
%
1. Mood Derivable
2
20
3
30
2.Explicit Performative
0
0
0
0
3.Hedged Performative
0
0
0
0
4.Locution Derivable
0
0
0
0
5. Want Statement
0
0
0
0
6.Suggestory Formula
0
0
0
0
7. Preparatory
8
80
7
70
8. Strong Hint
0
0
0
0
9. Mild Hint
0
0
0
0
Table 9
4.2 Mitigating Devices
Table 10 shows that interrogative is mostly used by all the South Asian
and the local Chinese students. When comparing declarative and
imperative, interrogative is a common syntactic form adopted by the
subjects despite the different situations. The data obtained also shows
the local Chinese students tend to use past tense when making a request.
Devices
South Asian
Local Chinese
Frequency
Percentage
Frequency
Percentage
Interrogative
104
88.1
92
76.7
Past tense
14
11.9
41
34.2
Embedded 'if' clause
1
0.9
0
0
Table 10. Syntactic Downgraders
Table 11 shows that both the South Asian and local Chinese students
adopt different kinds of internal modifiers when making a request. As
shown in the table, the students use grounders relatively frequent.
Grounders are used to give a reason to support one's request. In
addition, promises and sweeteners are occasionally used by the students
to soften the degree of imposition.
Devices
South Asian
Local Chinese
Frequency
Percentage
Frequency
Percentage
grounder
28
23.7
49
40.8
promise
6
5.1
8
6.7
checking on availability
2
1.7
4
3.3
getting a precommitment
1
0.85
0
0
sweetener
3
2.5
7
5.8
appreciation
3
2.5
0
0
disarmer
1
0.85
4
3.3
cost minimizer
2
1.7
1
0.83
Table 11. Internal Modifiers
Table 12 shows that both groups of students employ the mitigating
function 'Excuse me' when making request. They tend to use the alerter
'Excuse me' when talking to a stranger or someone with higher social
power. The students also used 'Hello', 'Hi' or 'Hey' to show friendliness
and in-group relationship to soften the degree of making a request.
Devices
South Asian
Local Chinese
Frequency
Percentage
Frequency
Percentage
Excuse me
21
17.8
30
25
Dear
0
0
1
0.83
Hello
2
1.7
1
0.83
Hi
1
0.85
0
0
Hey
21
17.8
6
5
Table 12. Alerter
Table 13 illustrates an interesting difference in the choice of request
perspective. The South Asian students will focus on the role of the
speaker while the local Chinese students choose to focus on the role of
the hearer.
Devices
South Asian
Local Chinese
Frequency
Percentage
Frequency
Percentage
Hearer oriented
53
44.9
70
58.3
Speaker oriented
61
51.7
43
35.8
Speaker and hearer oriented
0
0
1
0.8
Impersonal
4
3.4
6
5
Table 13. Request Perspective
4.3 Pragmalinguistic Competence
The data in Table 14 shows that both the South Asian teenagers and local
Chinese teenagers have improved their language skills because they are
able to fine-tune the force of their requests. The most frequent strategy
used is Stage 3 (Appendix C) is Unpacking, namely L2 learners are able
to shift to the use of conventionally indirect requests. Stage 4 - Pragmatic
expansion is the second most frequently used strategy for the South
Asian students. Overall, the L2 learners are able to increase the use of
mitigation devices.
Stage
South Asian
Local Chinese
Frequency
Percentage
Frequency
Percentage
1: Pre-basic
0
0
0
0
2: Formulaic
8
6.8
18
15
3: Unpacking
78
66.1
83
69.2
4: Pragmatic expansion
29
24.6
11
9.2
5: Fine-tuning
3
2.5
8
6.6
Table 14. Pragmalinguistic Competence according to the Five Stages of
L2 Request
Development (Achiba, 2002 and Ellis, 1992)
5. Results
5.1 Similarities
5.11 Sociolinguistic Competence