Hello to all readers,
Today I would be discussing on the first topic on communication systems: Speech Acts. Prior to the lecture, I had completely no ideas about what is a speech act? And what constitute a speech act? But we soon learnt that even the words we speak carry a lot of weight and meaning and it would lead to an action. As an example stated in the lecture notes, if a boss said “you’re fired!” to an employee, although it’s just a speech, but it is an action too because the employee need to start packing up and leave the place! This is what we called performative utterances. I’m not sure if I had interpreted the meaning correctly as I felt that this is like a kind of “order” which was given to you by a higher authority. For example, your mother asked you to “CLEAN UP YOUR ROOM!” and you would follow her instruction to carry out the tidying.
We also learnt that language is actually a very power~ tool of communication and every different language has its own way of performing a speech act. Basically the study of speech acts can be divided into three broad categories, namely: cross-cultural variation (between different languages), interlanguage variation (between native and non-native speaker of a given language) and lastly sociopragmatic variation (between people of different social profile of a specific language). From the example given in the lecture about how American response to a compliment in English and how a Chinese response to the same compliment in Mandarin, we can clearly see the different as the American are more prone to accepting the compliment while a Chinese would be fast to reject it.
Why is there a different?
I personally feel that it is actually due to the kind of society that we are living in and the kind of social values that we are taught in school. In the western country, they are more of an open society and they are taught to accept compliment and criticism gracefully. However in the east, such as in Singapore, our thinking are more traditional and conservative such that when facing a compliment, we would try to reject it and be modest but in actual fact we might be 1) having low self-esteem or 2) trying not to be hao lian(hokkien for arrogant) and make people think negatively of you.
There are still a lot of other studies that we can carry out to further analyse how people of different languages and cultures respond to different kind of scenarios like making a request, refusal or an apology. We still see the big differences between how American and Chinese respond to compliments but I foresee that the differences might get less drastic as I feel that through the use of technology, people get to mix around more. The world is just like a global village now where everyone link up to one another instantly. So with the mix of ideas and cultures, people will tend to blend in all and come up with another kind of behaviour that is “between” all the different values. A good example was the statistics that we took in class as we can clearly see that the percentage of accepting and rejecting is relatively similar. This might be due to the fact that Singapore is a central hub where the ideas and values of East and West meet and mix, and so that might explains why the result wasn’t as drastic as between American and Chinese and also it sort of coincide with my postulation that the differences might get less drastic with the flow of ideas and information but it would definitely take quite some time to achieve.
In any case, I like it how I was able to link what I have learned from GEK1036 to many of the knowledge I have gained from other modules. Please provide me with feedback so I can further improve my subsequent posts and let me end here with a funny video and hope everyone enjoy your weekend :)
Summary Post
16 years ago
