Speech Acts

During last Friday's lesson on speech acts, I learnt that there are differences between American speakers and Chinese speakers in the way they responded to compliments which was attributed to differences in social values.

What I found interesting was when the class had to classify own responses for the activity worksheet according to Chen Rong's categorisation systems, we actually had a high proportion of Accepting rather than Rejecting. While we joked that this meant we're not that humble, I think it proves that our generation is more influenced by western culture and thus some of us adopt the linguisitic politeness strategies used by Americans when communicating with others. This is not surprising considering the fact that we are highly exposed to American movies, music, TV shows.

Perhaps because we Singaporeans live in a multi-cultural society and each of us know at least two languages, I think most of us do okay at intercultural communication. In fact during the lesson, it was taught that intercultural miscommunication is a result of the lack of knowledge of cultural diversity. Hence, it is my opinion that since we are all living in a globalised world today, it is essential that we all make the effort to familarise ourselves with as many cultures as we can in order to better communicate and interact with people from different backgrounds and cultures.