This article reviews the notions of transfer and its subcategories of positive transfer as well as negative transfer.This article also considers the research on pragmatic transfer in the speech act of compliment in first language as well as second and foreign language contexts.In addition,it further explores three research questions concerning pragmatic transfer in compliment among Chinese EFL(English as a foreign language)learners.
The present study investigated the linguistic features of a special speech act,compliments produced by two groups of Chinese learners of English,one living in China's Mainland(EFL)and the other in Malaysia(ESL).This study compared and con-trasted the performance of the learner groups with that of native English speakers,aiming to determine how they employ compli-ment strategies in different situations and whether the exposure to target language(L2)community was helpful in pragmatic acquisi-tion.
