Gender Differences In Request Strategies In Chinese

Since the early 1960s, research on the speech act theory has received more attention from linguists. As a specific speech act, request has also attracted many researchers'attention. Many researchers have made wide research on requests and their socio-pragmatic factors. On the other hand, women's movement prompts linguists'interest in language and gender. However, researches on request from the perspective of gender are relatively little. This present thesis aims to investigate gender differences in the choice of request strategies in Chinese, with an attempt to explain such gender differences.This study collects data by means of modified Discourse Completion Test in questionnaire form. 140 subjects were selected from non-English major sophomores in Nanchang Institute of Aeronautical Technology and Jiangxi University of Traditional Chinese Medicine. 90 valid questionnaires are selected, half for males and half for females. Requests are affected by socio-pragmatic factors to certain extent. So this thesis analyzes gender differences in the choice of strategies in combination with three socio-pragmatic factors as social distance (familiarity), relative power (dominance) and sex of the addressee. The results show that: gender can interact with socio-pragmatic factors to affect the choice of request strategies. Gender differences in the choice of request strategies indicate that males and females treat requests differently. Males tend to maintain the requesters'faces while females tend to maintain the requestees'faces. Thus, females tend to be more tactful and polite than males in the choice of request strategies. Such differences are manifestations of different gender roles in the process of socialization.The study contributes to researches of gender differences in Chinese, understanding of universality of gender differences of language. The study is also conductive to the pragmatic researches of requests in Chinese. It may also give some implications to teaching of Chinese language to foreigners.