Cross-cultural Pragmatic Analysis on Speech Act

The theory of speech acts tells us that when words are uttered,they perform three different kinds of speech acts.But cross-cultural communication raises a question that the same locutionary acts may perform different illocutionary acts and perlocutionary acts,and in order to achieve the same illocutionary acts and perlocutionary acts,people with different native languages may employ different locutionary acts to avoid the pragmatic failure.This paper aims to illustrate the differences on greeting,requesting,and rejecting between Chinese and Americans,focus on the cultural factors in language and cross-cultural communication,and using the fundamental cross-cultural theories to analyze the distinctions,such as Austin’s Speech Act Theory,Brown and Levinson Face Theory,Edward T Hall’s High-Context and Low-Context Communication,and Hofestede’s Value Dimensions.Finally,it tells the English learners to focus on the cultural difference in the cross-cultural communication to achieve the successful communication.