A contrastive pragmatic study of politeness strategies in disagreement between native speakers of English and Chinese EFL learners

Abstract

AbstractThis paper attempts to make a contrastive cross-cultural study of a special speech act— “disagreement.” Participants are 35 American undergraduates and 42 Chinese undergraduates respectively with the data eliciting technique—DCT (discourse completion test). Findings show that Chinese undergraduates tend to use different politeness strategies according to different social distance and social power while American undergraduates prefer to use positive politeness strategy most followed by negative politeness strategy, regardless of social distance and social power. The results of the study reveal cultural differences between the U.S. and China that lead to the distribution of diverse politeness strategies and also offer insights into what Chinese EFL learners are struggling with during their development of interlanguage pragmatic competence.