CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION
1.1 Motivation
Serving as a universal speech act across languages, comforting is omnipresent in everyday life. It is not only behavior to assuage negative feelings but also a way to maintaining friendships, romances, and work relationships (Burleson 2003). Below is a comforting scenario
commonly seen in partnership.
(1) Speaker A: Ganggang biaoxian de tai cha le, wo juede hen
Example (1) shows that the two speakers, Speaker A and Speaker B, are group members.
When Speaker B heard that Speaker A was disappointed about his performance, he immediately uttered some promising words. In this case, Speaker B’s words did not merely show his concern as a partner but comfort Speaker A by offering a better future. Thus, functioning as emotional support, comforting skills play a crucial role in the interpersonal communication competence and the interpersonal relationship (Samter 2003, Burleson 2008).
However, the preference for emotional support differs from person to person and even from
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culture to culture (Burleson 2008). Considerable studies have focused on individual differences of merely either perceiving or employing comforting strategies (e.g., Burleson & Samter 1978), but the discrepancies between people’s perception and production of comforting strategies are worth investigation as well. Besides, an individual’s perception of the effectiveness of comforting strategies is closely related to his/her preference (Burleson 1994), but it has not been widely explored.
A broader aspect of cultural differences is worth further investigation. Burleson &
Mortenson (2003) and Duong (2008) were two of the few studies on the cultural differences between American and Chinese speakers’ evaluation and American and Vietnamese speakers’
preference for comforting strategies. Burleson & Mortenson (2003) found that Chinese speakers evaluated more positively on the messages that were viewed as avoidance by Americans. Duong (2008) compared different preferences for comforting strategies between Vietnamese and Americans, and found that Americans used the least amount of encouragements and Vietnamese seldom expressed sympathy when comforting others. Few have discussed the second language acquisition (SLA) of comforting, especially comforting in Chinese. In addition, the first language (L1) influence in the field of SLA remains a hotly discussed topic (e.g., Su 2010, 2012).
Speaking of culture-related theories, Hofstede’s cultural pattern (1980) is a theory to explain the cultural differences of evaluating or employing comforting strategies. Apart from
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it, Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory (1987) accounts such discrepancies from different perspectives.
From a Western perspective, Brown and Levinson (1987) divide face into negative and positive. Negative face is the need to enjoy the freedom to be independent and not to be forced by others. On the other hand, positive face refers to the need to be liked and accepted as inner-group members. According to them, a large proportion of speech acts are intrinsically face-threatening acts (FTAs). Acts such as advice, invitation, and promises threaten negative face of a hearer (H) by forcing him/her to do something. Acts like complaints, criticism, and disapproval threaten H’s positive face by ignoring of his self-image. As a result, to protect the face of both a speaker (S) and a hearer, people tend to employ strategies consisting of positive and negative politeness to minimize threats.
From an Eastern especially Chinese perspective, Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory has been criticized by Gu (1990) for not being suitable for Chinese data, since there is a gap between the concept of negative face in a Chinese view and a Western notion. For example, inviting in Chinese is not considered threatening H’s negative face as shown in the following
example.
(2) Speaker A: Mingtian lai chi wanfan.
tomorrow com eat dinner.
‘Come to have dinner tomorrow.’
Speaker B: Bu le, tai mafan.
not ASP too troublesome.
‘No! It will bother you.’
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Speaker A: Mafanshenma.
Trouble.nothing
‘Not at all.’ (Gu 1990: 252) In Example (2), speaker A insisted on inviting Speaker B to dinner even if Speaker B had already explicitly expressed his desire that Speaker A not do it. In this case, Gu argues that a European will feel that Speaker A’s act is intrinsically forcing, but a Chinese will think that Speaker A’s act is intrinsically polite. He claims that Speaker A’s insistence on inviting serves as good evidence of Speaker A’s sincerity so that the Chinese negative face is not threatened in this situation.
In addition, to perfectly elaborate Chinese data, Gu (1990) amends Leech’s politeness maxims (1983),1 which not just makes H easier to accept S’s offer, and indicates S’s sincerity in making the offer.
In short, polite behavior can be discussed from Eastern and Western perspectives. Thus, when we specifically concentrate on the issue of comforting strategies cross-culturally, different perspectives of politeness as well as the various cultural patterns merit further consideration.
Moreover, Brown and Levinson (1987) argue that sociological factors such as social power referring to the power relationship between different interlocutors, and imposition, which is defined as the degree of enforcement on H, influence the strategy use for speech acts.
1 In Gu (1999: 244), each maxim is further divided into the motivational level and the conversational level.
Different from the motivational level, the operation at the conversational level only regulates speech behavior without altering the nature of the cost at the motivational level.
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These two factors have later been adopted in studies of speech acts like apologizing, requesting, requesting, complaining, (e.g., Blum-Kulka, House & Kasper 1989, Trosborg 1995, Cheng 2001, Chen, Chen & Chang 2010). They have also been used in performing comforting behavior: Xu (2007) attested the effect of social power on producing comforting strategies.
Other factors like severity of problems and types of situations have been proved to affect people’s strategy adoption not only in other speech acts (e.g., Lin 2010, Hsu 2016), but also in the speech act of comforting (Burleson 1982, 1984). That is, whether a condition is severe or not has effect on people’s strategy employment, and so do types of situations like academic performances and social rejection. Therefore, the present study thus investigated these factors, namely, social power, severity of the problem, and types of situations. For the subject recruitment, our study as a cross-cultural one thus targeted at two language groups, Japanese and English, as the representatives from Eastern and Western cultures. That is, the present study examined the perception and production of comforting strategies by Japanese- and English-speaking leaners of Chinese as a second language (CSL).