（英语语言文学专业论文）基于文本探析《喜福会》中的文化冲突.pdf

abstract (chinese) ii 摘摘 要 要 本论文在 h.p. grice 的合作原则以及 brown and levinson 的礼貌原则的框架下，从语用学的角度，采用语料库检索的方法，调查美籍华人作家谭恩美 (amy tan) 的小说喜福会文本中的语言现象（如交际行为方式，静默的使用，词的使用）, 旨在探析语言现象背后折射的文化冲突。 语言可以说是研究文化最本质的要素。小说中的文化冲突主要体现于代别语篇和性别语篇中。 本论文一共分为六章，第一章提供本研究的概要介绍，并探讨用语料库研究文学文本的可行性和实用性。首先下载检索软件 concapp,然后建立小说喜福会的文本语料库，由于小说是由四对母女讲述十六个单独的小故事，根据内容进一步将母女两代的叙述分成两个文本进行横向比较。第二章主要是介绍作者的生平和回顾从文化和文体学角度有关喜福会的评论。第三章从语用学的角度为本研究提供理论基础。主要阐述 h.p. grice 的合作原则以及 brown and levinson 的礼貌原则,语言的直接性和间接性。人们离不开面子，交际也离不开面子；而面子又由“参与”和“独立”这一对积极面子和消极面子组成。在交际时，双方都面临一种双重危险，即双方同时面临积极面子和消极面子的挑战。所以交际者应考虑既维护自己的面子，又尊重别人的权力，应该措辞谨慎，做到恰当得体。反之则影响交际的正常进行。第四章为论文核心部分即实证研究部分，重点放在对小说文本的研究。从语料库中统计出文本中词语的出现频率入手，考察重点词语蕴含的深刻含义，对关键词进行词汇索引,研究词语与词语间的搭配等,从而揭示言语行为和非言语行为的表现及特征。对于言语行为的研究得出的结论是母亲的交际行为偏向于间接性，女儿的交际行为偏向于直接性。两者的冲突达到高潮时引起非言语交流沉默。沉默不仅表abstract (chinese) iii 现在母女关系中，也表现在两性之间。对人称代词和颜色词的研究也反映了中国文化和美国主流文化之间的冲突。第五章是建立在第四章的统计和分析的基础上，探讨小说中反映的中美之间的文化冲突。第六章为结论。在双文化背景下，女儿们一方面反对母亲的交际行为和文化观念，另一方面也感到自己的身份迷失。当女儿们的婚姻出现与母亲过去的婚姻中相似的问题时，她们开始反省自己的文化身份。只有找到了正确的文化身份，才能解决矛盾，打破沉默，达到有效的交际。 本研究具有一定的理论意义和实践意义。就理论意义而言，分析语言的直接性和间接性所反映的文化冲突，为人们理解跨文化语境下交际过程的复杂性提供了一定的参考。就实践意义而言，语料库的应用范围已经十分广泛，但是将语料库用于分析文学作品很少。打破了现行体系中定性分析过于泛滥的局面，采用了客观的定量分析的方法，是一种有益的补偿和尝试。但这并不意味着否定定性分析。定性分析仍占主导地位。两者互为补充。 关键词关键词： 喜福会 ；交际行为；文化冲突；语料库检索 abstract (english) iv abstract based on h.p. grices cooperative principle and brown and levinsons politeness principle, the focus of this thesis concerns exploring the cultural conflicts behind language use (such as communicative behavior, the use of silence, lexical items) through concordance search from the perspective of pragmatics. language can be regarded as the most intrinsical element in the research on culture. the cultural conflicts are mainly embodied in generation discourse and gender discourse. the thesis is divided into six chapters. chapter one provides a general introduction to my research. it also discusses the practicality and feasibility of using corpus. first the software concapp is downloaded then the text of the novel is set up. since the novel contains 16 independent stories narrated by 4 pairs of mothers and daughters, we can put the story of first generation together and that of the second generation together as two different texts, each one being created as a separate corpus for further research. chapter two dwells on the relevant materials, concerning the life background of the writer and the reviews on the novel from cultural and stylistic approach. chapter three lays the foundation for the study, discussing cooperative principle, face-saving theory, politeness strategies and directness and indirectness. face plays an importance role in communication and it is composed of “involvement” (positive face) and “independence” (negative face). therefore, communicators must take these factors into consideration to achieve successful communication. otherwise conflicts will arise. chapter four introduces the empirical study. the emphasis is placed on verbal communication and nonverbal communication. the research starts from examining the frequency of words in the corpus, then moves to search for collocations of keywords and to study the deep meaning behind them in order to demonstrate the process of conflicts abstract (english) v between mothers and daughters and probes into their communicative style. the finding is that mothers prefer indirectness while daughters prefer directness. when these conflicts become intensified, they plunge into non-verbal communication-silence. silence not only exists in generation discourse, but also in gender discourse. statistics about pronouns and color words further demonstrate the conflict between chinese culture and american mainstream culture. chapter five works on the cultural conflicts that are based on the findings revealed in the chapter four. chapter six is the conclusion part. it gets to the conclusion that in bicultural environment, the daughters on the one hand protest mothers communicative style and culture values, on the other hand, they are confused by themselves, feel lost about themselves until the similar experience in marriage makes daughters reexamine their cultural value and identity. through reshaping cultural identities, they find the way to break the silence and solve the conflicts between genders and generations. the significance of this thesis mainly lies in its theoretical and empirical investigation. theoretically, it explores cultural conflicts by analyzing directness and indirectness of language. empirically, it breaks through the flood of qualitative analysis in the current research on literature. but both qualitative and quantitative analyses are indispensable and the former should take the dominant position. key words: the joy luck club； communicative behavior； cultural conflicts；concordance search 上海交通大学上海交通大学 学位论文原创性声明学位论文原创性声明 本人郑重声明：所呈交的学位论文，是本人在导师的指导下，独立进行研究工作所取得的成果。除文中已经注明引用的内容外，本论文不包含任何其他个人或集体已经发表或撰写过的作品成果。对本文的研究做出重要贡献的个人和集体，均已在文中以明确方式标明。本人完全意识到本声明的法律结果由本人承担。 学位论文作者签名：朱姝姝 日期：2008 年 1 月 16 日 acknowledgements i acknowledgements first of all, i am extremely grateful to my supervisor prof. tong jianping for her valuable academic instructions and warm encouragement during my m.a. study. the work would not have been possible without her extreme patience and earnest guidance. her teaching and support not only help me in my thesis but also will benefit my future work and life. i also want to express my gratitude to all my teachers in the school of foreign language at sjtu for their enlightening lectures that are of great help to the accomplishment of my thesis. i owe my thanks to my parents and friends who have assisted me and encouraged me during the process of writing this thesis. chapter one introduction 1 chapter one introduction 1.1 background of the research how language represents the culture has long been, and still is, a major concern of philosophers of language. according to sapir (1921:221), language “is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desire by means of voluntarily produced symbols”. while in 1871, british anthropologist edward tylor first gave the definition of culture in his book primitive culture that “cultureis that complex whole which includes knowledge, beliefs, arts, morals, law, custom and any other capacities and habits acquired by man as a member of society”. language is a part of culture and a part of human behavior. every nation has its own cultural focus which is reflected in their languages. in the field of cross-cultural pragmatics, speech act behavior has been a central concern for researchers. from the surface meaning, cross-cultural communication refers to the communication between a native speaker and a non-native speaker, but more precisely, cross-cultural communication is communication between people whose cultural perceptions and symbol systems are distinct enough to alter the communication event. there are two kinds of human communication: verbal and nonverbal. verbal communication occurs when we use words to interact with others face to face while non-verbal communication doesnt employ words. some of the key components of verbal communication are sound, words, speaking, and language. it is not surprising to find that people have many obstacles in understanding one another and communicating with one another due to different cultural backgrounds, norms of behaviors, etc. it is cultural difference that causes many miscommunications. the root of cross-cultural difference is value. values are deeply held beliefs based on cultural traditions, religious teachings and long-lasting memories of personal experiences. therefore, the study of pragmatics to solve the obstacles is necessary. chapter one introduction 2 amy tans novel the joy luck club is a novel set in the cross cultural environment. nowadays china and america represent two of the largest cultural groups in the world. america has become an economic giant since the end of world war ii and its values and ways of life have permeated the globe. as we all know, america is the biggest immigrants country in the words, having the largest population of chinese immigrants and their descendants. the purpose of the thesis is to investigate how the cultural conflict between chinese immigrant mothers and their american-born daughters, wives and husbands are demonstrated through their speech behaviors. the thesis also serves as an example of using corpus in the study of culture and integrating the qualitative description and quantitative finds. the emphasis is put on the directness and indirectness of their communicative style. there is a theoretical discussion about grices cooperative principle and brown and levinsons face-saving theory and politeness strategies. directness and indirectness are the ways speech acts are performed. 1.2 research methodology its no denying that presently, the studies of literary texts are mostly qualitative comments with no statistical support of which the main reason is that quantitative involves time-consuming process. however, with the development of computer technology, a new and rising discipline, corpus linguistics, gradually glitters in the language world and can be applied in the field of literary criticism to analyze literary text. however, there are different views about corpus linguistics. it can be seen as a methodology that can count words, generate valid statistics for various questions, etc. the approach can be characterized as corpus-based when the theoretical framework is regarded as fairly stable. if it is flexible and dynamic, the approach can be characterized as corpus-driven (tognini-bonelli， 2001). in corpus linguistics, there is an emerging field of study that can be described as corpus stylistics. corpus-based stylistics is using the literary work as a corpus and the effective tools such as wordsmith, concapp, concordance etc. to analyze a text. corpora refer to “bodies of texts assembled in a principled way” (johansson, 1995: 19); a text is “an instance of language in use, either spoken or written: a piece of language behavior which has occurred chapter one introduction 3 naturally, without the intervention of the linguist” (stubbs, 1996: 4). corpus has been used in literary studies in recent years but it is still in its infancy. according to enkvist, statistical studies of style dates back in the mid-nineteenth century when augustus demorgan, an professor of mathematics in the university of london, suggested that w.heald at cambridge count word length in various greek texts to prove “that one man writing on two different subjects agrees more closely with himself than two different men writing on the same subject” (enkvist, 1973:129). since the 1950s, the computer has been used in literary and linguistic research. during the sixties, the computer began to be used for complicated lexico-statistical studies. take the dream of red mansion for example, it can be inferred that the book was written by two authors judging from the sentence length, type/token ratio, cognitive words etc. however, most of the application of computer to literary texts are used for identifying the authorship of a certain work, there is still much room left for further exploration. the reasons for using corpus are manifold, but the following are probably the most important ones. the first one is concerned with feasibility. leech and short has stated that “the recognition of cohesion and consistency in preference is important: without it, one would scarcely acknowledge a style. to go one stage further: consistency and tendency are most naturally reduced to frequency, and so, it appears, the stylistician becomes a statistician” (leech and short, 2001:42). the second one is to do with availability. some tools are easy to download and start via the simple and clear interface. some program files can even be downloaded from the website for free without any registration. thus makes them user-friendly text analysis program. in most cases, the texts can also be obtained from the internet. the third one is practicality. no matter how long a literary text is, the effective tools can edit files, do the keyword searching and plotting, list statistics like collocations, frequency, concordances etc. clearly in a second. new insight is brought to literary interpretation when theoretical support is combined with objective demonstration. the tools used in text-based research are wordsmith, concapp, concordance etc. in this essay concapp that can carry out concordance analysis, key word analysis and plot analysis is adopted. concordance, one function of concapp, is not only used widely in linguistic area, but also in analyzing literary texts. based on the concordances and other chapter one introduction 4 results drawn by concapp, statistical analysis is performed to describe the significant features of the novel. first and foremost, the corpus of the novel the joy luck club is constructed. the text is obtained from the internet, exactly the same as the original book. since the novel is narrated by eight characters separately, we can put the story of first generation together and that of the second generation together as two different texts, each one being a separate corpus for further research. 1.3 the organization of the thesis the present research is an attempt to create for computerized cognitive analysis. this is also an attempt to combine the quantitative and qualitative analysis together. it is hoped that this work can do the following: 1) offer some observations in using the concapp; 2) examine communicative style in verbal communication, implication of non-verbal communication; 3) explore the cultural conflicts based on the research of the text. this thesis consists of six chapters to illustrate the cultural conflicts demonstrated in the novel. chapter one provides a general introduction to my research. it also discusses the practicality and feasibility of using corpus. first the software concapp is downloaded then the corpus of the novel is set up. since the novel contains 16 independent stories narrated by 4 pairs of mothers and daughters, we can put the story of first generation together and that of the second generation together as two different texts, each one being a separate corpus for further research. chapter two dwells on the relevant studies, concerning the life background of the writer and the reviews on the novel from cultural and stylistic approach. chapter three lays the theoretical foundation for the study, discussing cooperative principle, face-saving theory, politeness strategies and directness and indirectness. face plays an important role in communication and it is composed by “involvement” (positive face) and “independence” (negative face). therefore, communicators must take these chapter one introduction 5 factors into consideration to achieve successful communication. otherwise the conflict will arise. chapter four introduces the empirical study which the emphasis is placed on verbal communication and nonverbal communication. starting from the frequency of words in the corpus, then searching for the collocates of keywords and studying the deep meaning behind them in order to demonstrate the process of conflicts between mothers and daughters and probe into their communicative style, the author finds that mothers prefer indirectness while daughters prefer directness. when these conflicts become intensified, they plunge into non-verbal communication-silence. silence not only exists between generations but also between husbands and wives. the study of sensory words demonstrates how the ice is broken and cultural conflicts are solved. the use of pronouns and color words also demonstrate cultural conflicts between chinese culture and american mainstream culture. based on the findings in the chapter four, chapter five works on the divergence between chinese and american cultures. chapter six is the conclusion part. in the conclusion, the author summarizes the main findings and limitations of the thesis, and points out possible field for future study.chapter two relevant studies of the joy luck club 6 chapter two relevant studies of the joy luck club 2.1 about the writer amy tan was born on february 19, 1952 in oakland, california. amy grew up in both american and chinese cultures. her father, john, was a baptist minister and electrical engineer. he immigrated to the u.s. to escape the turmoil of the chinese civil war. her mother, daisy, a vocational nurse had divorced an abusive husband but lost custody of her three daughters. she had to leave behind three other daughters in china when she escaped on the last boat to leave shanghai before the communist takeover in 1949. this inspired amy tans novel the joy luck club. when amy tan was 14 years old, tragedy struck her family when her father and older brother died of brain tumors. her mother moved to switzerland with the remaining child to get out of this emotional devastation. the deep grief haunted amy and became the recurring element in her novels. by the time amy finished her high school, her relationship with her mother was in constant conflict. they didnt speak for six months after she left the baptist college which her mother had chosen for her and further abandoned the pre-med course her mother encouraged to pursue linguistics. she obtained m.a. in linguistics in 1974. she also did postgraduate work at the university of california at berkeley from 1974 to 1976. in 1974, she married louis demattei, an attorney. it is obvious that tan mixes her own life experience with her writing which makes her fiction more riveting and truthful. and it seems that tans mother provide an inexhaustible storage of materials for her. upon the publication of the joy luck club in 1989, tans book won enthusiastic reviews and spent eight months on the new york times best-seller list. later, she wrote the kitchen gods wife (1991), the hundred secret senses (1995), the bonesetters