| This research is a pragmatic study of how the Lahu Xi People make courtship requests in Lahu dialect. By making a request, the speaker infringes on the recipient's freedom from imposition. The recipient may feel that the request is an intrusion on his/her freedom of action or even a power play. As for the requester, s/he may hesitate to make requests for fear of exposing a need or out of fear of possibly making the recipient lose face (Blum-Kulka et al.,1989: p.11). In this sense, requests are face-threatening to both the requester and the recipient. Since requests have the potential to be intrusive and demanding, there is a need for the requester to minimize the imposition involved in the request. One way for the speaker to minimize the imposition is by employing indirect strategies rather than direct ones. Both situational and cultural factors influence the use of request strategies. Different cultures seem to agree on general trends of situational variation. For example, for the Lahu Xi people, when they make the courtship requests they would like to use the indirect strategies for the honour of their family in case they will lose face in the courtship request. Moreover, in the Lahu Xi dialects, you will find none of them mention the word marry or engage when they make courtship requests, in both the dating episode or the offering episode. If they want the son of one family to be their son-in-law, they ask his mother for the seeds of rice, the pumpkin, the corn, or the sesame seed or some other seeds of crops. Sometimes, they will ask for the rooster, boar, bull. In different situation they will use different expressions. So, in this thesis, the author will be trying to show how the Cooperative Principle (CP) and the Politeness Principle (PP) interact in the interpretation of this indirectness.To the extent that its object of analysis is real and observable cases of language use, this research is by nature a qualitative research. The study attempted...
|
PDF Full Text Request