troubles than to shoulder the responsibility, and Taiwanese were brave on action and timid on lectures.
And finally, on commiseration, Americans had foreplay of giving hearing notice, showing sympathy, and giving pacifiers and Taiwanese were not as strong in showing sympathy. Americans reassured good efforts and fact, but Taiwanese didn’t state the reassurance as much. But Taiwanese did show the dare to blame on the others by standing by the speakers and by pushing the complainers to move forward.
EFL group
The EFL group, being learners of intermediate-to-high intermediate level language proficiency, showed certain resemblance to Americans in their attitude toward people of different social distances; they had less jokes/teasing, less contradiction. Such tendency got more support in analytical results of the actual wording used in the responses though three groups did share some features as well.
With complainers of different social distances, EFL and Americans had the second high records with friends in zero response categories. They joked more with friends and contradicted more with intimates.
EFL group tried to find all reasons to sustain what speakers said and the counts of contradiction were only 24 and 16 of out of them were contradicted with different ways of seeing things.
A Contrast with Bulge Theory. Not as Wolfson’s (1988) research on the
speak act of compliment and invitation, the extremes didn’t share the similar counts of experience; this research on the responses to indirect complaints is consistent with Boxer’s (1933) research on that the bulge is not in the middle for friends, but at one end of the continuum of strangers or intimates. Here as a way to check the
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relationship of the strategies and the social distances, the line charts of the responses are follows:
Figure 5.1 Zero responses across social distance continuum
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Americans and EFL had similar curve in the distribution of zero response strategy. Taiwanese had attitudinal warmth and were comparatively more responsive to friends and strangers than the other two groups. By reviewing the detail of
subgrouping, Taiwanese had less zero responses out of disagreement. Although Americans and English learners exercised less zero responses towards intimates, Taiwanese did have slightly more zero responses with intimates. Although with intimates, people were free to express their true feeling. It was the interaction with friends and strangers that we found much more constrained to behave within the confines of politeness expectation (Boxer, 1993). Americans and English learners might apply the strategy to minimize possible conflicts in interaction. We observed that among interlocutors of strangers, the desire to be polite might be stronger than the desire to increase solidarity.
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Figure 5.2 Response requesting elaboration across social distance continuum
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Response requesting elaboration was the only strategy that showed no significant difference. Three groups had similar curve lines in the strategy of
responses requesting elaboration. The chart was almost similar with Wolfson’s (1988) study with the bulge in the middle of the continuum indicating friends showed
marked difference in the frequency of responses in RRE. We observed that Taiwanese and English learners were more responsive. As mentioned, English learners in this study were motivated to language learning. They might take the chance to create opportunities in practicing negotiated interaction. They believed the solidarity-establishing speech behavior with native speakers is the root of successful sequential interaction. However, we observed that Taiwanese had records asking
“How much do you have every month?” and English learners asked “Where did you spend your money?” but no such kind of topic in the questions raised by Americans in our study. Peeping into the privacy of money matters is a taboo in the American society but it was a caring gesture for Taiwanese and English learners among peers, We found questions of “Why….?” in the American group but no such utterances from Taiwanese group nor EFL group. This explained Taiwanese’s weakness in
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reiterating the power of facts and reasons. This pragmatic transfer was observed in the language behaviors.
Figure 5.3 Jokes/teasing across social distance continuum
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The diagrams for EFL and Americans shared great resemblance in Figure 5.3.
It might because Americans were more of individualism, they were careful with the protection of self-images and they wanted to play-it- safe. English learners learned there was a land mine territory, they were careful if they didn’t want to be offensive with improper jokes/teasing, but still they would be in comparatively more joking mood with their friends. Taiwanese played with mood of the situations more often than the other two groups. They had more freedom and less worries while speaking with intimates.
Figure 5.4 presented the contradiction strategy used by different groups across the social distance continuum. Taiwanese utilized the contradiction strategy the most. They contradicted especially with their friends. Americans were the opposite. They contradicted less with the friends. While with English learners, they contradicted the least, and still they showed more confidence in interacting with
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intimates by not worrying of offending them. The quantity analysis showed that Taiwanese contradicted the most and English learners contradicted the least.
Figure 5.4 Contradiction across social distance continuum
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All three groups shared similar curve when utilizing advice/lecture strategy across social distance.
Figure 5.5 Advice/lectures across social distance continuum
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Taiwanese showed giving more advice/lectures to their intimates. In here, we still observed English learners’ willingness to interact with the speakers. They might have used more verbal strategy to achieve their pragmatic goal as mentioned above.
They still inclined to give advice/lectures more to their intimates.
Figure 5.6 Commiseration across social distance continuum
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In our definition, the difference between advice and commiseration was that advice really showed the intention to help out with or without showing sympathy and understanding to their speakers. In other words, commiseration was more of showing sympathy with words, and this structure was quite mature with American speakers.
In comparing the subgrouping elements, we found that Taiwanese and English learners were consistent in their weakness in showing sympathy with words, especially in the use of “I am sorry”. In American English, “I am sorry” doesn’t really have to the expression of incidentally hurting someone. But Taiwanese and English learners seldom used the expression in showing commiseration. This
illustrated what Giles’ (1979) viewpoint in that lexis could be an intra-lingual marker
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of group identity. The difference pertains to the socio-cultural idiosyncrasies of language use and may be treated as the pragmatics of the language.
Figure 5.7 Overall responses across social distance continuum
With all the respondents’ counts in every cell of the strategies, it shows that all groups put in more efforts to strangers and then intimates but slightly a bit less efforts on the interaction with friends. The diagrams show the bulge slightly open to the up side.
Figure 5.8 Wolfson’s Bulge
The diagram shows the bulge in Wolfson’s Theory (1988). It was quite different with all the other diagrams that we discussed in the previous pages but only
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that of responses requesting elaboration. Our study was consistent with Boxer’s (1993) observation that the bulge was not seen in the speech act of responses to indirect
complaints.
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HAPTER 6
CONCLUSIONIn this chapter, the major findings are summarized. They focus on the social norms and values, and how they influence on people’s responses to the indirect complaints. Pedagogical implications are provided. The limitations of this study and suggestions for future study are addressed.
As language behavior is closely bounded to the cultural norms, language
performance is different from culture to culture. It is highly possible that a suitable speech behavior in one culture might be very disagreeable in another (Yu, 2004). To facilitate students with better communication skills, teachers should incorporate the concept of speech act into their syllabus design (Wikins, 1976).