Abstract
The research investigated the thanking/gratitude strategies of three distinct cultures; Hausa, Chinese and Arabic languages with the aim of finding out the different strategies used by them and how different they are in their use of such strategies. The study employs Cheng (2005) Taxonomy of gratitude strategies in analyzing the data which was obtained from 15 participants among the Hausa, Chinese and Arabic students in UPM through the use of DCT (discourse completion Task) which were translated by the researchers into the three languages respectively before retranslated in to English language for analysis. The findings show a significant relationship in the use of “Simple Thanking strategy” among the three cultures as this strategy is utilized in 71.60% of the responses in the Hausa version of the DCT, 62% of the Arabian responses in the Arabic version of their DCT and 63.75% of the responses in the Chinese version of the DCT and were all found to be in the “thanking alone and thanking followed by the favor strategies” consistently. While the least used strategy is the “recognition of imposition” which was only realized by Arabian students and none was found among the Hausa and the Chinese students. Keywords : Cross-cultural, gratitude, discourse completion task, taxonomy
Highlights
According to Crystal (1999) “Pragmatics is the study of language from the point of view of the user especially of the choices they make, the constraint they encounter in using language in social interaction and the effects of their use of language on other participants in the act of communication” As an aspect of Pragmatics, speech acts can be seen as one of the most fundamental in the study of pragmatics and discourse analysis in general
The most used strategy according to the data is “Expressing positive feeling” with 6.17% after that is the use of “attention getters” within another structure with 6.17%
Figure and Table illustrate that the thanking strategy with (62.50%) is the most frequently used strategy
Summary
According to Crystal (1999) “Pragmatics is the study of language from the point of view of the user especially of the choices they make, the constraint they encounter in using language in social interaction and the effects of their use of language on other participants in the act of communication” As an aspect of Pragmatics, speech acts can be seen as one of the most fundamental in the study of pragmatics and discourse analysis in general. Austin (1962) defines speech act “as actions performed by saying something”. Man in his desire to express himself in the real world does not merely make utterances with any grammatical or lexical functions and makes some acts through the utterances. The data for the study is going to be collected using DCT (discourse completion Task) which the students will complete. In order to compare the participants’ “thanking strategies”, the participants will complete the same version of DCT questionnaire adopted from Bodman and Eisenstein (1988) which will be translated into the different languages of the participants and later in to English for the analysis
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