The Study Of Requests In Dream Of Red Mansions

This paper concludes the speech act theory set up by John Austin and John Searle, and analyzes and discusses the situations of request speech act and request strategy in A Dream in Red Mansions based on this theory. We get the characteristic of the request speech act and request strategy that Chinese ancient used by studying A Dream in Red Mansions, and illustrates this point. We find request speech acts of different Chinese show the unique characteristics when applying different request strategies.The first chapter briefly introduces the topics reason, meanings of study, Situation of Study at home and abroad and research contents and methods. The second chapter introduces he speech act theory set up by John Austin and John Searle, and analyzes the request speech acts in A Dream in Red Mansions based on this theory. The third chapter classifies the request speech acts in A Dream in Red Mansions, and analyzes the characteristic and application laws.Firstly, we find that the characteristic of directive request strategy is the widely use of vocative expression. The long history of civilization and the traditional virtues determines the politeness and humanity of the request speech act. Secondly, the use of the conventional indirect strategy in the text shows the times characteristic, that is specific words in specific time. Hinting strategy is one of the request strategies seldom used in A Dream in Red Mansions, because of its fuzziness. External correction strategy makes the request speech act of Chinese more euphemistic and cautious because of the influence of the mean ideology.We find there are all kinds of factors influencing the request strategy by studying the request speech acts in A Dream in Red Mansions. Such as political and economic factors at that time, the character of the roles and cultural factors. Therefore, only understanding Chinese history and culture that can we understand the rules and characteristic of the request strategy, and enrich the study of Chinese request speech act.