(College of Foreign Languages, East China Normal University) [摘要] 本文讨论人际交际中的文化行为。作为一个常见的互动现象和文化语用学的基础性概念，文化行为的提出不仅具有理论意义，也具有其重要的实践意义。文化行为与一般言语行为有何联系与区别？文化行为的基本成因是什么？日常话语要成为特定情境中的文化行为需要满足何种条件？文化行为何以模式化？这些都是本文力图说明的问题。 0. To examine how a cultural act is constructed requires that we observe how an utterance gets its cultural interpretation(s). Let’s look at the following examples: 1] A: Chi le fan zai zou ba? (offering to invite B to stay for meal) B: Bu le, wo hai you shi ne. (refusal, with an excuse) A: Neng you shenme shi ne?! Chi le zai shuo.( sticking to the offer ) B: Aiya, na , wo jiu gongjing buru congming le. (Accepting) Why do we take ‘gongjing buru congming’ (literally meaning ‘It’s better to obey your order than remain polite/stand on the ceremony.) as an acceptance of an offer? Why does it require at least two exchanges of turn-taking instead of one turn-taking ‘No thank you.’? If you are familiar with the Chinese culture, you will know that it is not preferable for a person to accept an offer or invitation too earnestly. People generally find an excuse to testify the sincerity of the offer if they really want to accept it or find it hard to decide on what to do. So until A repeats the offer so as to strengthen it, B will never say ‘yes’. And even if he wants to say ‘yes’, he would say it indirectly so that it implicates that it is not me who is eager to stay for the meal but you who want me to do it. What does this show? It shows that without the cultural context, it is hard to decide what an utterance is intended for and how it can be taken culturally. This supports Searle’s claim: ‘ X counts as Y in C.’(p 33). Therefore, ‘gongjing buru congming’（恭敬不如从命） is taken as a cultural act of acceptance of a situation-specific offer or invitation because it is done in Chinese cultural context. I. Defining features of a cultural act The idea of cultural act is relatively new and of fundamental importance to a cultural pragmatic interpretation of language use because it is a basic unit of cultural interactions among members of a culture-specific community. Then how do we define such an act? What are the differences between a cultural act and an ordinary speech act? Then let’s look at the following definition: A cultural act is an act, verbal or non-verbal , situation-required, that is driven by or guided by or relevant to（therefore defined by） certain cultural goal(s) of interaction. From the definition we know that a cultural act has a higher-level intention built upon a basic-level (secondary or situation-specific intention) one .e.g 2] Student:(meeting her teacher on the road): Lao shi hao! (Hello,Sir/Madam) Teacher: Ni hao. (Hello.) As 2 shows, when a person meets another, greeting is situation- required, and usually, who initiates it is optional. But there is a cultural need for a student to greet his/her teacher first, and not vice versa , since Chinese culture honors a teacher in the same way as it does the male parent (yi ri wei shi, zhong shen wei fu). Therefore, greeting the teacher is an act with a cultural goal of showing respect, that is also culturally required. When it is very cold outside, Mom says to her son ‘Wai mian leng , duo chuan dian’r.’(Put on more clothes for it’s cold outside.) , she is mainly intending to show concern about her child’s bodily comfort. The situation-specific need is for her to remind her son of the weather condition, but the cultural assumption is for her to show motherly care/concern in mother-child interaction. Therefore, a cultural act is a double-functioning act, with the cultural illocutionary point (to borrow Searle’s term) as the primary (higher-level) and the situation-specific intention as the secondary ( basic-level) illocutionary point(goal(s) of interaction). II. Construction of a cultural act Assuming what I’ve said above is valid, and a cultural act is mainly a speech act, then how is a cultural act constructed? To understand this, we cannot avoid the two important concepts Searle has proposed: the constitutive rules and regulative rules. And since a cultural act is a cultural intention acting upon a basic-level speech act, and cultural assumptions are mainly regulative in function, then we can probably assert that a cultural act is constructed by cultural assumptions (Brøgger,1992) regulating the constitutive rules of a situation-specific speech act. Just take ‘lying’, for instance. It is generally not welcome or encouraged throughout the world, but in certain cultures, lying could be well-intended and ill-intended. In Chinese culture, lying as a situated strategy is often appreciated. The Chinese table manner requires guests to lie to hostess, esp. when some dishes are not delicious at all, for telling the truth would mean a great hurt to the hostess. Therefore, what constitutes cultural acts has to do with a variety of cultural assumptions on an immediate context. But what are the speech-act-relevant cultural assumptions? Cultural assumptions on speech acts fall in different categories: 1] beliefs, values and attitudes; 2] principles, norms and rules. As we might see, every culture has its shared beliefs, values and attitudes of verbal behavior or behavior in general. It is the beliefs and values that help shape the attitudes of speakers and hearers to towards particular acts in context so that some acts are culturally favored or preferred while others are disfavored and avoided, and even become taboos and prohibited. Chinese culture has a whole set of such beliefs and values. One is that of less talk and more deeds. Chinese people believe that a good person /gentleman should be cautious about his speech/verbal behavior(讷言敏行/ 君子讷于言、敏于行). If one has to talk , he has to be very cautious and slow but quick to act. This drives most Chinese people to like those who don’t talk much and dislike those who are too talkative. Besides , Chinese culture also stresses the consistency between words and deeds(言行一致) so that those who always say something, make promises without actually keeping them , those who easily forget or deliberately break their promises , and those who say in one way but act in another (yanxing buyi , kou shi xin fei , shuoyitao zouyitao ) tend to be disliked and distrusted . A related belief is yan duo bi shi( too much talk leads to mistakes/failure.) so that a mature person will consciously avoid being talkative , and would always advise his talkative neighbor or friends or brother or sister not to be so even when he or she finds it hard to hold back words in certain context. Deng Xiao-peng is still appreciated for his habit of hitting the point without much talk and doing things quickly and efficiently. Principles, norms and rules are representations of culture-specific beliefs and values and contribute a lot to cultural acts. Principles are guidelines to most cultural members and to some core members are the bottom-line to observe if they are determined to stick to them. ‘He’ –the Harmony Principle , is a guideline to generations of Chinese. It has two norms or rules of behavior, one positive and supportive(he) , the other preventive (wu zheng –Don’t contradict/ No dispute). This principle specifies that interactants in communication should try as much as they can to construct a harmonious , peaceful, comfortable and reciprocal air so that interaction tends to be much easier and more fruitful, and that they should try to avoid confronting one another because such a confrontation will not only cause communication break-down ( failure , suspension) ,but also block channels for further interactions. That is why as soon as two persons come into heated debate or irreversible conflict, a third person may get in to dissolve the crises by demanding each person to keep quiet and talk less. Chinese cultures stresses endurance and giving in (retreat) and five features of behaving (wen , liang, gong , jian ,rang )—moderate and mild, kind-hearted and considerate, respecting and modest, simple and self-regulating , and giving in and ready to compromise – are highly appreciated. Aggressiveness in communication is not encouraged, and in many cases discouraged. All these have one ultimate goal --- to create and sustain an atmosphere of interaction (He—Harmony). In order to achieve such, a person from the moment of knowing things (dong shi) would be taught to endure and dissolve conflicts internally by communicating between the two selves and enriching/promoting one’s moral virtues and refinements. Rules and norms are more compulsive in situation-specific interaction than principles for framing or shaping behavior manners (guiju –fangyuan). III. Conditions of satisfaction of a cultural actWhat conditions should an utterance meet so as to count as a cultural act? There are four aspects to be noticed--- 1] an utterance that meets a situation-specific cultural need; 2] one that is likely to produce a cultural effect; 3] one that goes well with or at least does not go against cultural assumptions; 4] one that performs a cultural macro-function. An utterance U can be made cultural iff it meets a situation-specific cultural need. To speak well of someone is ordinary , but in Chinese culture it is always appreciated for a person to speak for another when he or she is bound to be commented. This is called ‘cheng ren zhi mei’. Helping a person to win love of his/her is such a realization of chengquan (making it possible to him to succeed in his attempts) someone and this is culturally appreciated [zai hua—zai chi]. An utterance is possibly culturally significant iff it is likely to produce a cultural effect. Greeting an elder person with endearing terms by a junior is taken as a cultural act because it tends to produce a warm feeling of respecting the old/senior citizen. And this causes an effect of harmony among social members. An utterance becomes culturally acceptable if it follows certain cultural rules or institution or at least does not violate such. To make good remarks on a senior at his birthday celebration is such an acceptable cultural act even if you don’t like him very much. An utterance tends to be cultural iff it performs certain macro-functions of cultural affinity. Cultural acts can help to sustain/maintain, strengthen , create and reconstruct its core beliefs , values , attitudes and vigor so that the whole community could stay united as a whole. Praising, introducing, instructing, exemplifying, recalling glories, exchanging feelings and experience, opening to new ideas, criticizing bad deeds and words, encouraging, apologizing for one’s wrong deed and so on can perform such functions and help to minimize disagreement and conflicts. IV. Modeling a cultural act As is illustrated above, a cultural act has its situation-specific cultural need(s), its relevant cultural intention (goal of interaction) ,forces and effects, its cultural institutions and its macro-functions. Through frequent uses and feature-abstraction, a variety of relevant and successful utterance forms and interactive patterns are abstracted from situation-specific cultural interactions and they constitute part of a culture’s scripts. It is the network of such patterns that builds a model for interpreting an utterance as a cultural act. The internalization of such a model constitutes the mental reality of cultural acts—the cultural pragmatic competence. Bibliography BrØgger, Fredrik Chr., 1992, Culture, language, text in : Cultural studies within the study of English as a foreign language, Scandinavian University Press. Duranti Alessandro,1997,1999, Linguistic anthropology, Cambridge University Press. Barton, E.L., 1990, Non-sentential constituents, John Benjamins Publishing Company Grice. H.P., 1975, Logic and Conversation., in Cole P. and Morgan He,Gang,1997, Mode of acts---Conventionalization of the use of language, Journal of Foreign Languages, 97/3. He Gang, 2003, Emotional Expression—acts in cultural contexts, Foreign Language Research, 03/1. He Gang, 2004, Cultural assumptions on speech acts, Foreign Languages Study, PLA Institute of International Relations, Nanjing, Issue 5. Levinson, S.C. 1983, Cambridge Univ. Press. 孔子，《论语-学而》(Confucius, Analect. Learning) Searle, J.R., 1969, Speech acts—an essay in the philosophy of language, Cambridge University Press About the author: He Gang, doctor and professor of linguistics and English , is now employed by both East China Normal University College of Foreign Languages and College of Foreign Languages , University of Shanghai for Science and Technology. His major interest right now is a systematic understanding of how language contributes to the construction of cultural reality, which is both theoretically universalism-oriented and practically Chinese culture-specific. The present paper is intended to construct a basic-level category for such a program. |
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