Negative Pragmatic Transfer in Compliment Responsesby Chinese College-level English Learners

周 树 涛

(黑龙江八一农垦大学 英语系，黑龙江 大庆 163319)

1 Introduction

Pragmatic transfer refers to the influence exerted by learners’ pragmatic knowledge of languages and cultures other than the second language on their comprehension, production and learning of the second language pragmatic information. Negative transfer indicates inappropriate transfer of the first language sociolinguistic norms into the second language. Negative pragmatic transfer, as Rizk explains, takes the form of translating some “formulaic expressions/ phrases” functioning to express different speech acts in the first language to express the equivalent speech act in the second language.

Complimenting is an often-used speech act in our daily life and it serves to increase or consolidate the solidarity between the speaker and the addressee. Responding to a compliment is very skillful act. Scholars have done some researches in this field. Lorenzo-Dus concluded the existence of cross-cultural and cross-gender similarities as well as differences between the subjects. Chen Rong found that Chinese non-native speakers tended to reject compliments.

2 Research Purpose and Questions

The study aims to illustrate the strategies employed by Chinese college-level English learners in their expressions of compliment responses, and examine if there is the phenomenon of negative pragmatic transfer. Two research questions are asked: 1.What are the strategies employed by Chinese college-level English learners within Chen’s taxonomy? 2. Is there any negative pragmatic transfer in the speech act of compliment responses? If there is, what are the reasons?

3 Research Methodology

3.1 The Subjects

A total of 120 subjects contributed to this study. In the process of selecting the subjects, an English test was conducted and their scores were used as the criterion for the selection. The subjects represent the learners with different levels of English proficiency. All the subjects have no learning experience in English speaking countries, which means they have little amount of exposure to the target language’s norms of the speech act of complimenting in their real lives.

3.2 Research Instrument

A DCT was employed as the research instrument to collect the data in the present study. DCT is considered appropriate to the present study for the following two reasons: First, DCT enables the researchers to obtain sufficient data in a relatively short period of time. Second, situational variables such as gender, social status, social distance etc, can be effectively manipulated so that it enables researchers to focus on a given language phenomenon and further investigate, predict and test it comparably. A DCT was carefully designed in which eight different situations relating to different topics about appearance, character, ability and possession were included to elicit the compliment responses. Each situation presented respondents with a detailed description of the context.

3.3 Research Procedures

In order to test the feasibility of the study, the first version of DCT questionnaire was pilot-tested with another two small groups of students before the actual study. DCT questionnaire was revised and modified according to their compliment responses to ensure that those situations designed were authentic and appropriate and the descriptions of the situations were clearly understood. The final questionnaires were distributed to the students in a university with the help of English teachers. Subjects were asked to write down their responses to the compliments which they think the most appropriate in the specific situations. The percentage and Chi-square were employed to detect whether the difference was statistically significant. The study also invited three American foreign teachers to evaluate the subjects’ performance with regard to appropriateness.

4 Results and Analysis

4.1 Compliment Response Strategies Employed by the Subjects

In this study, we follow Chen’s taxonomy of compliment responses in that it is the most appropriate one for the purpose of the present study. The collected utterances were coded into different strategies according to Chen’s criteria. However, we make some modifications of the classification because of several new strategies were created for those compliment responses that did not fit any of Chen’s original ones. The strategies were then grouped into the three super categories: Accepting, Deflecting/Evading, and Rejecting.

A total of 960 compliment responses were elicited. The data collected are considered as a whole regardless of the subjects’ levels of English proficiency in order to better illustrate the Chinese college-level English learners’ actual realizations of compliment responses.

To detect the statistical significance of difference among the three super strategies, Chi-square test is conducted with the statistics. The calculating result is the difference of occurrence frequencies among the three super strategies is highly significant (X2=577.93>5.99 at the 0.05 level of significance). That means the super three strategies do not carry equal weight. The super strategy “Accepting” occupies the far higher incidence than the other two super strategies. The total amount of strategies pertaining to the super category “Accepting” in the present study accounts for 69.48% of all the responses, a little more than two-thirds of all. Chinese college-level English learners prefer the following order in CRs, namely, “Accepting”, “Deflecting/Evading” and “Rejecting”.

4.2 Evidence of Negative Pragmatic Transfer Found in DCT

Although the trend and distribution of major super strategies in the present study is close to some of studies conducted in some English speaking communities, we cannot just assume that Chinese college-level English learners can communicate with native English speakers smoothly and appropriately without any difficulty and there are no pragmatic transfer existing in the data. During the analysis of the data, we do find some inappropriate expressions of negative pragmatic transfer which may bring intercultural miscommunication and trigger conversational breakdowns. If the Chinese college-level English learners attempt to avoid communication failures when responding to compliments, it is very necessary to analyze the negative pragmatic transfer.

One major manifestation of negative transfer is “the transferring from the mother tongue to the target language of utterances which are semantically or syntactically equivalent, but which, because of different ‘interpretive bias’, tend to convey a different pragmatic force in the target language”

Example 1: “We are neighbors; I’ve just done what I should.”

Example 2: “Your friend is my friend. I should do in that way.”

The above two examples are typical expressions of negative transfer. In Chinese, The two sentences are appropriate and modest expressions in accepting a compliment, but for the native English speakers, they may be confused. Because they would interpret the underlying meaning of the sentences into “You give too much praise for what I have done, or the thing I have done is just what I often do and it’s unworthy of complimenting”. In this case, the Chinese speaker of English transfers the pragmatic meaning, which is pragmatically appropriate in Chinese but inappropriate for the native English speakers.

Different cultures have different sets of protocols. Chinese culture is greatly different from western cultures in English speaking communities. Analyzing the compliment responses in this empirical study, we find lots of expressions with unique Chinese characteristics, but inappropriate and unacceptable in native English speaking societies.

Example 3: “I still have much to learn.”

This is a usual way of responding to compliments to show modesty but never appears in native English speaking countries and easily causes the intercultural misunderstandings. The subtext of the native English speakers: “My ability is not good enough and therefore your compliment is not true”. The doubting of the sincerity of compliment can cause the conversational breakdowns.

5 Reasons for Negative Pragmatic Transfer

The following factors cause the occurrence of negative transfer.

The first one is “different equivalents between English and Chinese. Language is the reflection of culture and plays a very important role in it, they cannot exist without interacting on each other. Totally understanding the linguistic forms, such as words and expressions in the native language is a tough task due to the existence of polysemy and synonyms, not to mention those in different languages. In intercultural communication, every linguistic form carries certain cultural meanings, so understanding and interpreting such linguistic forms must go along with the understanding of their cultural connotations. Even some words and expressions in English and Chinese are identical semantically and syntactically, they may have different pragmatic force and function and thus can be interpreted differently. For example: “High school” doesn’t refer to the school that offers higher education, but an upper secondary school which educates children from grade nine or ten through grade twelve in America. “A busybody” is not a person who is very busy, but someone who meddles or pries into the affairs of others.

Improper teaching method is the second factor which affects intercultural communication and causes negative transfer. Although some influential teaching methods are welcomed and discussed warmly in China, such as communicative language teaching, the grammar-translation method is still often used in English teaching. Many teachers get into the habit of applying this method without reminding the students of the culture-specific appropriateness in language use, which causes the misunderstanding that words or expressions in Chinese have the same meaning with their formal equivalents in English and vice versa. But the fact is that it’s very hard to find exact match of linguistic forms in different languages. As a result of this improper teaching, Chinese students may think that the Chinese compliment response strategies can also be used in English to show modesty.

The third reason of the occurrence of negative transfer is due to the differences between English and Chinese cultures. It is well-known that Chinese people value collectivism while native English speakers cherish individualism very much. Collectivism society emphasizes the interdependence of every human being and the priority of group goals over individual goals. This well explains the reasons for this sentence, “It’s my duty to help you”. According to the individualism, all values are human-centered, the individual is of supreme importance, and all individuals are morally equal. Individualism places great value on self-reliance, on privacy, and on mutual respect. Individualists believe that it’s wrong to force others to do things they don’t want to do. So the subtext of the sentence “It’s my duty to help you” reflects a kind of involuntariness and it is against native English speakers’ opinion of freedom.

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