Communicative Acts

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.1 Communicative act
A communicative act refers to an utterance or a set of utterances, which means expressing oneself by using a combination of words, noises and sound, and therefore communicates with the others. Communicative act is also named as speech act. Austin (1962) defined language as a medium of information sharing, because language included different classes that perform actions. He described different speech situations that vary the class of performed acts. One of the preformed acts within the class included the speaker making statements, asking questions, giving command, giving reports, greeting and warning. Other than speech acts, Austin called the member of this class as ‘illocutionary acts’. Austin’s definition has been followed and developed widely in the field; many linguists gave further explanations on the term ‘speech acts’.

Based on Austin’s definition, Searle (1971) founded that communicative act can be divided into five classes:
1)Representatives: The speaker represents the state of an affair
2)Directives: The speaker aims to get the hearer to commit future course of action
3)Commissives: The speaker commits future course of action, usually with a promise
4)Expressive: The speaker wants to express himself/herself on feelings or attitudes, etc.
5)Declarations: An extralinguistic context that changes the state of an affairs, for example ‘You are fired!’ (Matthews, 2007)

1.2The speech act of Apology

Apology plays an important role in communication, and Searle (1969) had classified it as an ‘expressive act’, because apologize can repair and harmo...

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... are 9,258 non-Hong Kong companies on register in Hong Kong. It is common for these companies to hire people from different nations, in order to get contact with more markets. The figures provided by the Steering Committee on Population Policy showed that within the labour force of Hong Kong, there are only 2.5% of professionals hired from overseas (86,781 workers)(until 2012), and surely there are still many local labours that carry a different culture. Hong Kong as an international city, it is common to have different races and cultures. Therefore, a lot of corporations in Hong Kong contain workers from different races and cultures. In order to help the working efficiency through avoiding most of the conflicts cause by cultural misunderstanding, it is better to study the apologies in an international business, including the preferred ways in most of the cultures.

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