• 沒有找到結果。

Politeness in maternal regulatory language

Chapter 5 Discussion

5.3 Politeness in maternal regulatory language

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and mothers in their country are likely to use imperative to regulate their children.

However, America is an individualistic country and mothers in America choose indirect forms. Our data were collected in Taiwan which is sorted as a collectivistic country like Estonia. After examining our results, the imperative form occupied the highest frequency of sentence type in both directives and prohibitions. The preferred sentence type of imperative for Taiwanese and Estonian mothers could be explained by the asymmetrical status and power relation between their mothers and children (Blum-Kulka, 1990). The hierarchical status relationship in Taiwanese and Estonian collectivistic countries would be revealed by the high frequency of imperative. On the other hand, America is a individualistic country and de de-emphasize the power distance, so probably it would be the reason why indirect forms instead of direct forms are found in Bellinger’s (1979) study.

Another culture differences could be found in different concepts for effectiveness.

According to Gao (1999), the use of imperatives is the most effective and appropriate way to regulate a child’s behavior in Chinese. However, the use of imperatives is considered the least efficient by users of English. Therefore, we found high frequency of imperative in our data because the Mandarin mother probably considers the use of imperatives as the most effective way.

5.3 Politeness in maternal regulatory language

Politeness reflects pragmatic knowledge because the principle Be polite is a part of adult pragmatic competence (Lakoff, 1973). Lakoff proposes that adults follow three rules of politeness, Don’t impose, Give options, and Make the addressee feel good. The three rules mean to avoid intruding/imposing upon the hearers, to give them options, and to make them feel good. Since the rules of politeness are part of

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pragmatic competence for adults, children will acquire the rules to achieve adults’

competence (James, 1978).

The results of semantic modification in Section 4.3 showed that bald and

minimization are two primary modifications which the Mandarin mother chose to use in two control acts, respectively. Brown and Levinson (1987) suggested that the use of bald is an appropriate strategy for a mother to use. In mother-child interaction, the mother is powerful and does not fear retaliation from the child. It is small for the mother to satisfy the child’s face (Brown and Levinson, 1987). Therefore, the use of the dominant semantic bald in the Mandarin mother’s regulatory language is

appropriate because the mother is much more powerful than the child.

Another semantic modification mainly used in this study is minimization.

Minimization belongs to mitigation, and mitigation is used to soften control acts which bring face threats. Since mitigation is used to mitigate face threats, it belongs to politeness (Blum-Bulka, 1989). In addition to politeness, mitigating one’s intention plays a large role in pragmatic competence (Brown & Levinson, 1987). The child will eventually acquire pragmatic competence in being polite as an adult. That process is what Snow, Perlmann, Gleason, and Hooshyar (1990) suggested that parents provide preschoolers a lot of data related pragmatics to acquire. In other words, we can find the Mandarin mother used bald for her power status and used mitigation, especially minimization, to let the child ultimately acquire the pragmatic competence of politeness.

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Chapter 6 Conclusion

In this chapter, the summary of this study is presented in Section 6.1. In addition, the limitations of this study and suggestions for future research are offered in Section 6.2.

6.1 Summary

This thesis aims to investigate how syntactic directness, semantic modification, and content are respectively realized in two maternal control acts, namely, directives and prohibitions, in Mandarin maternal regulatory language. The results revealed that the mother probably preferred to use the imperative, which belongs to the direct form, in both directives and prohibitions. Two possible explanations may be used to explain this finding. Firstly, the preference for the use of the imperative may be related to the child’s cognitive development. The mother understands that the child has a limited logical and reasoning ability, so she might choose to use a direct form to ease the cognitive processing burden. Secondly, the preference for the use of the imperative form may also be explained from the aspect of cultural factors. The Mandarin mother may tend to prefer to use the imperative form since the culture in Taiwan is

considered as a collectivistic culture in which power distance is identified. After analyzing the semantic modification in directives and prohibitions, the result indicated that the mother is inclined to use bald in directives and mitigation, especially

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minimization, in prohibitions. Additionally, bald and minimization are two primary modifications in both control acts after examining the data at each of child’s four ages.

The mother’s power status is higher than that of the child’s, so it is appropriate for her to choose bald. The use of minimization obviously belongs to politeness. Therefore, politeness is embedded in the Mandarin mother’s regulatory language, and the maternal input will help the child to ultimately acquire pragmatic competence in politeness. This study also discovered two major kinds of semantic combinations. One is minimization and repetition. The other is minimization and justification. Finally, the results of contents for control acts show that competent action often occurs in

directives. As for prohibitions, appropriate behavior and caretaking are most related.

Based on our findings, the Mandarin mother seems to favor the direct, imperative form of regulatory language, and semantic bald or minimization forms.

6.2 Limitations and suggestions

Although we have gained some findings about the Mandarin maternal

regulatory language, there are still limitations in this study. First, the results derived from this study may be influenced by an issue of individual differences, but this study would certainly shed some light on the Mandarin maternal regulatory language.

Second, the child’s cognitive development at four ages all belongs to the

preoperational stage, so the findings may be limited in application. It is suggested that future studies may investigate children at other cognitive stages, in order to see if their parents’ regulatory language changes with the growth of the comprehension abilities of the children. Third, the present study only focused on a boy with his mother. The sample is not big enough, so more research should be done with a larger sample.

Fourth, future research may investigate that either directive or prohibition would be

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the most effective way to regulate children. Next, some studies also have found variations in the regulatory language of parents when speaking to either their sons or their daughters (e.g., Gleason, Ely, Perlmann, and Narasimhan, 1996), so future research also might examine the maternal regulatory language used with children of different genders. Last, the use of more direct forms may elicit more compliance from children (e.g., Schaffer and Crook, 1980), so future research may investigate the relationship between compliance rate and form.

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Transcribing symbols

(Adopted from MacWhinney, Brian. 1995. The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.)

xxx unintelligible speech, not treated as a word xx unintelligible speech, treated as a word . period

? question

! exclamation

# pause

### extra long pause between words -: lengthening

+… trailing off

+^ quick uptake

[/] retracing without correction [//] retracing with correction

<> portion of utterances been overlapped [>][<] overlapping utterances +/. interruption

+, self-completion [= text] explanation

[=! text] paralinguistic material

%act: action tier

%sit: situation tier

%com: comments by investigator

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