| Abstrakt: |
Cognitive linguists have recently made great efforts to integrate their research interests with Labovian sociolinguistics. One of the promising areas of investigation in cognitive sociolinguistics is metaphor variation. In this study, we aimed to compare metaphor differences in email invitations from Chinese speakers of English and native speakers of English. Twenty-nine college students in Taiwan were recruited to write English email invitations in four hypothetical situations, so a total of 114 invitation emails were collected, which constituted the Chinese English corpus. These students were also asked to download 56 email invitations from the Internet to constitute the non-Chinese English corpus. Our preliminary observations led us to identify two metaphors for the respective corpora: "Giving invitation is borrowing money" for the Chinese English corpus, while "Giving invitation is delivering messages" for the non -Chinese English corpus. To test our hypothesis, we compared these two sets of data in terms of information sequencing and verb usage. For information sequencing, Chinese speakers of English tend to locate their invitation sentences in the later part of an email because they consider invitation as a face-threatening act, which requires small talk before they actually state their purposes. As for verb usage, Chinese speakers of English preferred to use WANT, NEED, and HOPE in their invitation sentences since these three verbs express their personal needs. A VARBRUL analysis was conducted to identify three factor groups that could best account for the use of these three verbs: i.e., email sender's role, gender and perceived distance between the sender and the recipient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
