On the Problematic Use of ‘don’t worry’ by Chinese Learners of English

Abstract

In this paper, we examine uses of ‘don’t worry’ by Chinese speakers of English, which may trigger intercultural irritations. We investigate such problematic uses from a contrastive angle, by considering whether they relate to the fact that in Chinese there are two expressions which may be equivalents of English ‘don’t worry’: fangxin 放心 (lit. ‘ease your heart’) and bie-danxin 别担心 (lit. ‘don’t burden your heart’). First, we present uses of ‘don’t worry’ by Chinese learners of English and examine them through the lens of speech acts and interaction. Second, we undertake a corpus-based study of the speech act-indicating interactional uses of ‘don’t worry’, fangxin and bie-danxin, teasing out their conventional uses. Finally, we consider whether uses of ‘don’t worry’ by Chinese learners of English are influenced by pragmatic transfer and, if so, what this transfer looks like.