An experimental study of the classification and recognition of Chinese speech acts

This study examines how Chinese speakers categorize speech acts and whether their utterance comprehension involves speech act recognition. We examined these questions referring to the methods of Holtgraves (2005, ; cf. Holtgraves and Ashley, 2001, ). A pilot experiment was first conducted to establish a Chinese speech act database for our major experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 allowed participants to classify speech acts using their own criteria. The findings showed that participants categorized speech acts based upon perlocutionary effects, which is consistent with the claim made by Holtgraves, rather than illocutionary points, as Searle (1979) proposed. The second issue tested in Experiments 3 and 4 concerned the recognition of speech acts. The results obtained from Experiment 3 corresponded to the finding by Holtgraves and Ashley: Chinese participants recognized the illocutionary acts when they comprehended the target utterances in contextually specified situations, which supports Gricean theory. Experiment 4 did not provide strong evidence that Chinese speakers recognized the illocutionary act of an utterance when interpreting the utterance online.