摘要
Although a large number of studies have focused on various aspects of politeness,very little is known about how politeness intention is activated cognitively during verbal communication.The present study aims to explore the cognitive mechanism of politeness intention processing,and how it is related to pragmatic failure during cross-cultural communication.Using 30 Chinese EFL university students who were instructed to finish a probe word judgment task with 96 virtual scenarios,the results indicate that within both mono-and cross-cultural contexts,the response time in the experimental scenarios was significantly slower than that of the filler scenarios.This suggests that politeness intention was activated while understanding the surface meaning of the conversation;however,the EFL learners could not completely avoid the negative transfer of their native politeness conventions when they were comprehending the conversational intention of the target language.Furthermore,no significant differences in response time were found between the groups with high and low English pragmatic competence,illustrating that transferring the pragmatic rules and principles into cross-cultural communication skills was more cognitively demanding.Overall,this study adds to the literature on politeness research and provides some implications for foreign language pragmatic instructions.
尽管有关礼貌的研究为数众多,然而却少有研究涉及言语交际中礼貌意图的在线激活与加工。对此,本研究采用96个虚拟交际情境并结合探测词判断任务,旨在探讨跨文化交际中礼貌意图加工的认知机制及其与语用失误的关系。随机抽取30名中国大学生作为本研究的被试。结果表明:无论在单一文化还是跨文化背景下,实验情境中被试对探测词的反应时均显著慢于控制情境,表明其在理解话语表面义的同时也激活了礼貌意图;然而,中国英语学习者在理解目的语礼貌意图时,无法完全避免母语礼貌习俗所带来的负迁移。此外,研究并未发现英语语用能力高低组之间对礼貌探测词的反应时存在显著差异,说明将语用规则转化为跨文化交际能力对于外语学习者的认知要求更高。本研究对于外语语用研究和教学具有一定的启示意义。
