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Chapter1 Introduction

1.1 Research background
Globalization accelerates its pace all over the world, leading to the increasinglyfrequent communication among the different countries which has brought us intodirect and indirect contact with people who, because of their cultural diversity, oftenbehave in ways that we do not understand. The conflicts among various cultures oftencause the obstacles in the communication, especially for the second language learnerswho are often faced with the failure to communicate effectively with the nativespeakers even though they have a good command of linguistic knowledge of thesecond language such as the phonology, syntax, grammar and lexicon of the targetlanguage. Language is one major representation of a certain culture and itscorresponding beliefs and values. Therefore, in addition to the linguistic knowledgethe language learners should acquire, they are also supposed to comply with thecommon rules which is obeyed by the corresponding cultures.Apologizing is a speech act which can be often seen in our daily life. Narrowlyspeaking, people may take for granted that apologies refer to such expressions as"sorry" or "I apologize". In a broad sense, the speech act of apology is a behaviorwhich usually occurs when the speaker intentionally or accidentally offends the hearerin the hope of maintaining the former harmonious interpersonal relationship, restoringhis social position and building up a good individual image. Due to the differentlanguage structures and cultural backgrounds, the expressions for making apologies indifferent languages differ from each other. But on which occasions do apologies oftenoccur, and in what ways do people make apologies owing to the distinct languagesystems and cultural backgrounds. Chinese learners of Japanese will find it very hardto make an apology in Japanese for the misunderstanding is likely to occur between aChinese or a Japanese.Much research work has been done on the speech act of apology in the westerncountries for the past years; but most previous researches have just focused on thecomparison between the two different languages in terms of features of grammar andlanguage structures, without paying attention to the social context. Moreover, amongthe substantial empirical studies on the speech act of apology and the comparisons ofapology strategies employed by different cultures in the last three decades, only a fewstudies of apologies in Chinese have been conducted including comparisons ofapologies between Chinese and other languages, but not between Chinese andJapanese.This paper attempts to make a comparative study of the speech act of apology, byanalyzing differences in the use of apology strategies and examining the factors whichmay have an influence on the choice of apology strategies such as the social distance,relative power, severity of offence, gender and so on, to raise the cultural awarenessof the language learners who wish to develop their communicative competencethrough knowing and abiding by the rules of communication.

1.2 Research questionsT
his thesis aims to find out the differences of apology strategies employed byJapanese and Chinese through a contrastive analysis and the factors contributing tothe differences. The research questions are given as follows:RQ1: How are apology strategies used by Japanese and Chinese?RQ2: How do apology strategies used by males diffe本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。