Abstract
This study used the ethnopragmatics approach to examine the cultural-based knowledge that guides Cantonese and Anglo-English speakers when offering death-related condolences, or what we refer to here as ‘condolence routines’. The data came from discourse completion tasks, the existence of cultural key phrases, and the authors’ native-speaker intuitions. We examined condolences that are offered to a good friend who has recently lost someone close to him or her. We present cultural scripts that are proposed to account for the linguistic contrasts in Cantonese versus English condolence routines. The Cantonese script is entirely new while the English script is revised from a previous study. Based on our analysis, we conclude that the primary contrast is that Anglo-English condolences typically focus on expressing that the condoler feels sad because of the bereaved’s loss, while Cantonese condolences typically focus on telling the bereaved not to be sad and to take care of his-or herself. Knowledge of this contrast in sociopragmatics is not only a meaningful contribution to the study of pragmatics; it is also of practical help to people in regular contact with Cantonese and/or Anglo-English speakers. It can help one to understand how to avoid saying something during a condolence routine that may sound inappropriate, or even insensitive, to speakers of these two languages.
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- 1.
Even though there are five different lexical terms in Cantonese representing different types of uncles, the second and third author do not believe that a different type of uncle would inherently influence how the bereaved feels about an uncle’s death. They feel it is the psychological relationship that matters, and they would predict that under normal circumstances a Hong Kong Cantonese condoler’s speech would not be influenced by which type of the condoler’s uncles has died.
- 2.
There has been a great deal of contact with English in Hong Kong. It is therefore possible that these uses of ‘I’m sorry’ found in the Cantonese data are an influence from English condolences based on a misinterpretation of it as an apology rather than an expression of sorrow.
- 3.
We recognize that our scripts do not represent a comprehensive contrast: cultural scripts that addressed all possible contexts and socio-cultural variables would no doubt include much more than what we show in [D] and [E], but we do believe that these scripts capture what are arguably the most prominent cultural differences.
- 4.
Elwood (2004: 55), for example, said that some of her English-speaking Japanese informants used a response that was inappropriately formal for a verbal offering of condolences: ‘Please accept my condolences’. She speculated that it is a phrase they had learned from the classroom or a textbook.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Angie Wakefield for distributing the English DCTs, as well as all the participants who filled out the DCTs. We appreciate the helpful comments from Mona Law and Maurice Kong on the Cantonese word 親 ‘close’. We are very grateful for comments from the anonymous reviewers. Any faults that remain are our own. This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund Sinophone Borderlands—Interaction at the Edges CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000791.
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Wakefield, J.C., Chor, W., Lai, N. (2020). Condolences in Cantonese and English: What People Say and Why. In: Mullan, K., Peeters, B., Sadow, L. (eds) Studies in Ethnopragmatics, Cultural Semantics, and Intercultural Communication. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9983-2_3
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