A Cognitive Analysis Of English Request Construction And Its Implication To EFL Teaching

Request speech act serves as a prototype closest to social interaction and therefore attracts much attention from linguists.Previous studies on requests are mainly about the strategy of requesting,the degree of politeness,and related face-threat issues.However,there are rare researches study request from the perspective of Construction Grammar.Given this,the current thesis defines requests as constructions in the context of Construction Grammar.Syntactically,Request Construction can be characterized as I NEED X,I WANT X,I’D LIKE X,CAN/COULD/WILL/WOULD YOU X and IMPERATIVES.The semantics of Request Construction are stating needs,asking the ability and willingness of the requestee performing the requested action,and describing the performing of the action.Request construction is related to basic human experience.A request is a dynamic event containing BEFORE scenario,MID scenario,and AFTER scenario,respectively referring to the creation of a request idea,the confirmation of the addressee’s ability and willingness to comply with the request,and the fulfillment of the requested action.To identify the characteristics of English request constructions of NES and the implied cognitive motivation;explore what is the effective way to conduct English request teaching,this thesis firstly collects eight categories of request construction from the spoken section of the British National Corpus and 95 college students’ request expressions from questionnaires.Then a contrastive analysis of the use of Request Construction between NES and CEL is made to find out if there are some shortcomings of CEL’s English Request Construction acquisition.Finally,according to contrastive analysis,a construction-based English request teaching plan would be proposed.The findings are as follows:(1)Need Constructions’ request meaning is activated by metonymy,salience,and people’s basic life experiences.CEL’s Need Constructions only accounts for 4.56%(27/592)of all their Request Constructions,confirming that CELs have not acquired the syntax,semantics,and pragmatics of Need Construction.(2)The request meaning of Ability Construction and Willingness Construction is motivated by metonymy,salience,and cultural conventions specified in the Cost-Benefit Cognitive Model(Ruiz de Mendoza and Baicchi,2007).NESs and CELs usually project their attention onto the MID scenario and use Ability Constructions most,and they often modify and specify requests by adding me,us,or please.But CELs nearly use no just/little/bit to reduce the Ability Constructions’ request cost and show no preference to registers.There is little distinction between the uses of two Ability Constructions.What’s more,COULD YOU PLEASE VP is used frequently by CELs,but no WILL YOU X construction appeared in CEL’s corpus,which shows that CELs might only perform well in RC’s syntactic acquisition but are deficient in semantic and pragmatic acquisition.(3)The Action Constructions of AFTER Scenario express request directly,and CELs have no bias towards registers when using PLEASE-IMPS;hence a bad performance of CELs’ semantic and pragmatic acquisition of IMPERATIVES can be concluded.Based on the above findings,this thesis advocates a construction-based request teaching.Teachers firstly present enhanced skewed filled request constructions,encourage students to motivate cognitive operations,such as analogy and segmentation,through activities to generalize partially-filled constructions.Then teachers should help students categorize partially-filled constructions into no-filled constructions by discovering the implied construals of constructions and build a network of Request Constructions.Finally,based on the request construction network,the teacher helps students acquire a deeper understanding of the request event frame and produce specified Request Constructions.