Altered speech act indication: A contrastive pragmatic study of English and Chinese Thank and Greet expressions

Abstract This paper provides an analytical framework for studying the relationship between conventionalised expressions and speech acts. In certain languages, such as Chinese, the relationship between expressions and speech acts tends to be straightforward. In other languages, such as English, this relationship is more casual. Notwithstanding this linguacultural difference, expressions associated with particular speech acts in these two languages can fulfil other pragmatic functions than simply indicating the speech acts that are conventionally associated with them. To capture such alternative uses of these expressions, we propose the superordinate category of ‘altered’ speech act indication which consists of a system of three analytical pairs. We investigate such altered speech act indication from a contrastive pragmatic angle by drawing on English and Chinese corpora. In particular, we study the expressions that are associated with the speech acts Thank and Greet.