A Study Of Social Variables Affecting Requests In Chinese

The present research investigates the influence of the five social variables on requestsrealized in the Chinese context, and thus examines whether Brown and Levinson’s universalclaim of politeness theory holds true for requests in the Chinese culture. These five variablesare social power, social distance, rank of imposition, gender, and age. The first three variablesare chosen because they are claimed to be the most important factors in the assessment of facethreat universally by Brown and Levinson. Gender is included in the study since thedifferences between men’s and women’s speech have long been investigated in westernculture, but not so in Chinese culture, especially in the performance of the speech act ofrequests. Age is examined in this research because East Asian countries have a notabletradition of respecting the old both in speech and in behavior.A group of195university students took part in the present investigation. Data werecollected mainly through the Discourse Completion Test (DCT) with15situations, followedby an assessment questionnaire examining the participants’ perceptions of power, distance,and degree of imposition. All the2,760valid requests were coded according to the codingscheme developed from the Cross-cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP) codingmanual. The data were then analyzed for the different request elements of alerters,perspectives, strategies and modifications. The major findings are summarized as follows:1. When examined alone, all the five variables were found to have significantelyinfluenced the choice of the request elements. Power, distance, and age appeared to each havea stronger influence thaneither rank of imposition or gender.1) Power greatly affected the employment of the different request elements. When thepower relationships changed between the speakers and the hearers, then the use of alerts,strategies, and modifications varied accordingly.2) Distance was also a strong variation predictor of requests in Chinese. The closer theinterlocutors were, the more direct the strategy was. In addition, relatives and strangers on theone hand, and intimates and acquaintances on the other, consistently displayed two differentpatterns of realizing requests in alerters, perspectives, opting out, and modifications. Suchresults thus lend strong evidence to the Bulge theory, proposed by Wolfson (1986,1988).3) Rank of imposition was found to have influenced the realization of requests in Chinese. However, its effect was not as strong as that of power or of distance. The most obviousinfluence of rank of imposition was on opting out. When a higher rank of imposition wasinvolved in the requests, then the participants showed the highest incidence of opting out.Rank of imposition showed a very weak influence on request strategies and modifications.4) Similar to rank, gender also showed a very weak influence on requests in Chinese.Males and females displayed more similarities than differences in their choice of alerters,request perspectives, strategies, and modifications. The major differences were that femaleswere slightly more indirect than males; females preferred supportive moves, while malespreferred internal modifications in their requests.5) Age was found to have influenced the choice of the different requests elelments. Thetwo age unequal groups displayed many obvious differences in their realization of requests.Requests made upward (by younger speakers to older hearers) were more indirect, moreheavily and politely modified, and with more either1alerter or>1alerter. In contrast,requests made downward were more direct, less modified internally, and with noticeably lessalerters.2. When the five variables were taken into consideration together, then social power,social distance, and age were the important variables that showed the most explanatory valuefor requests in Chinese. The influence of rank of imposition, and of gender, was weak.1) The variables that significantly influenced the choice of alerters were power, distance,and age. Rank of imposition and gender showed no significant effect on alerters.2) The perspective of impersonal, the most widely chosen perspective, was significantlyinfluenced by distance, gender, age, and power, but not by rank of imposition. Hearerdominance was affected by gender, power, and age, but not by distance and rank of imposition.Speaker dominance was significantly correlated with age, distance, gender, and rank ofimposition, but not with power.3) The choice of directness level was significantly correlated with power, distance, age,and gender. Rank of imposition was not proved to be a determinant of request strategies.However, it was found to be the most important predictor of opting out in requests in theChinese context.4) The statistically significant determinants of downgraders were rank of imposition, age, and gender. Power and distance were not found to relate with downgraders.5) Four variables were found to be variation predictors of supportive moves in requests inChinese. These were rank of imposition, age, distance, and gender. Power was the only factorthat did not reveal any significant correlation with supportive moves.Based on the above findings, it is clear that the three variables of social power, socialdistance, and rank of imposition, claimed to be the most important ones by Brown andLevinson, do not always significantly affect the request realization in Chinese. The variable ofage, which is not included in Brown and Levinson’s model, is found to always have asignificant influence on requests in Chinese. Although the influence of gender on requests inChinese is not very strong, the results suggest that the language in requests of males isdifferent from that of females. To summarize, Brown and Levinson’s universalistic politenesstheory might be too simplistic. Requests are realized according to social norms in China, andare thus embedded in culture. Speech act studies should not ignore the culture in which thespecific speech act is realized.