A Contrastive Study Of Request Strategies In English And Chinese

As the title of this dissertation indicates, this dissertation is intended to describe and explain the common and different strategies of requests in both English and Chinese in a contrastive approach, which is based on the questionnaire survey of Americans and Chinese people. Request is chosen mainly because it is widely used in a variety of situations of our daily life. For example, asking somebody to pass the salt at the dinner table, or asking someone to turn down the TV when we are sleeping. From the studies of requests by scholars, such as Lyons (1977), Searle(1979), Leech(1983), Searle & Vanderveken(1985), Tsui(2000) and our present research, we could arrive at some understanding of requests: requests are attempts on the part of the speaker in discourse to get the hearer to perform or to stop performing some kind of action, meanwhile the addressee is left with the right to refuse to comply(see Section 1.3). Note that the requested act is a future act within the reach of the addressee's ability. This definition can be fully evidenced in the most popular use of the conventionally indirect strategy in requests. Consider the examples below:(1) 帮我打扫一下厨房,好吗?(2) Would you mind helping me clean up the kitchen?By the term of strategy, we don't mean the "disease to please" somebody (To be a "nice" person, one tries to live up to the requirements of ten "shoulds"), as described by Braiker (2001), but mean that the speaker is not necessarily seen to use a single choice of expressions in expressing requests, s/he can be allowed to make full exploitation of whatever strategy or strategies s/he wishes to apply for the maximum effect in terms of concrete situations. That is, the choice of the vocabulary, grammatical structure, sentence pattern, the arrangement of the text and even the intonation in order to achieve the desired goal. The studies of many scholars, such as Searle (1976), Ervin-Tripp(1977), House (1986), Blum-Kulka (1987), Blum-Kulka & House (1989), Blum-Kulka, et al (1989), Ellis (1994), Liao (1997) and Gibbs (1998) have found that three categories of head request strategies are employed widely in daily verbal communication. They are direct (e.g. I want you to shut up. / You'll have to move the car.), conventionallyindirect (e.g. Let's play a game. / Can you draw a horse for me?) and non-conventionally indirect strategies (e.g. This game is boring. / We have been playing this game for over an hour now.). In addition, we add two further categories: opting out and combined strategies because such two categories can be often evidenced in our experiences of interaction. By opting out, we mean that the speakers have the option not to say if they feel they would not say anything in that particular situation. By combined strategies, we mean that when the speaker requests the addressee to do something, s/he has to employ more than one strategy on some occasions. For example:(3) Hey, Judith, I really need some help, can you please lend me your notes? (direct + conventionally indirect) (4) 我需要用厨房,你是否可以帮我打扫一下?(direct + conventionally indirect) Moreover, the use of modifications(internal and external), tokens, perspectives, address form, "please" and "请" can also be exploited as strategies of a request. In a word, there are three kinds of macro-strategies for requests, they are respectively: head request strategies (e.g. direct and conventionally indirect strategies), parasite strategies (like modifications, tokens and perspectives of requests) and inferring strategies (such as the use of assumption device,rhetorical questions and metonymy). Why do we take the strategies of requests into account? It is mainly because requests are intrinsically face-threatening acts in terms of Brown & Levinson (1978/1987). If requests are not made appropriately, the desired goal may not be reached. Meanwhile the hearer (H) may be embarrassed, or the relationship may be damaged. Other things being equal, generally the larger the request is, the greater the imposition on H...