A Study Of The Speech Act Of Request In Prison Break

Speech act of request has been the focus of pragmatics and sociolinguistics. Of which a great number of researches have been conducted both at home and abroad. But most of them are done with data from Discourse Completion Test (DCT) questionnaire or role-play. So far there is no study of English request speech acts with data from TV drama under the context of prison; nor is there study of response, an essential part of speech act of request.This thesis aims to explore how people use speech act of request and response in the context of prison. Three research questions are designed: 1) Why do people prefer to use direct request speech act rather than indirect request speech act in this specific setting? 2) What kinds of request strategies do they use to realize their requests? And how do they mitigate the contradiction with politeness? 3) What response strategies do they employ to the requests?Data collected for this study comes from American TV drama Prison Break. The coded samples are analyzed in both qualitative and quantitative methods under the operating theory frameworks of Blum-Kulka, House & Kasper's (1989) Cross- Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP) and Levinson & Brown's (1987) politeness principle (PP). Major findings are: direct strategy is the most frequently used strategy. This result seems to contradict with politeness principle. But further analysis indicates the application of certain kinds of internal modifications minimizes the imposition. Therefore, it accords with PP. Study of response strategies in this context provides three forms: receiving requests, partly receiving requests and refusing requests.This thesis ends with limitations and recommendations for further research.