Predictability Of The Formula Of "computing The Weightiness Of Fta"

In everyday life, people carry out a series of speech acts, such as requests, apologies, compliments, and refusals, to express their needs or ideas. Among these speech acts, requests are apparently the simple and everyday use (Craig et.al.,1986). In the Western literature, the speech act of Request by definition is a face-threatening act (FTA). In order to mitigate the unavoidable imposition caused by performing such a FTA, various politeness strategies are adopted (Brown & Levinson, 1987; Leech, 1983) and the abundant linguistic forms available on the realization of request behavior manifest itself the complexity of the association of forms, meaning and social relationships between interlocutors (Blum-Kulka et al, 1989:11).Brown and Levinson (1987) put forward the formula"Wx =D (S, H) +P (H, S) + Rx"to calculate the weightiness of face-threatening acts. However, Brown and Levinson's theory has been criticized on many fronts since it was proposed. The following shows two criticisms that appear to be the most important. The first criticism of Brown and Levinson's theory is that their model of politeness is ethnocentric, deriving"directly from the high value based on individualism in Western culture"(Kasper, 1990:252-253). As a result, its claim of universality is cast in doubt. The second criticism of Brown and Levinson's theory is that their distinction between negative politeness and positive politeness is dubious (Meier, 1995:384).Since Brown and Levinson's formula is supposed to be indicative, and there are so many criticisms on Brown and Levinson's theory, the purpose of this study was to test the formula and avoid the above two main criticisms at the same time. This study chooses the speech act of request made by Chinese students to challenge the first criticism. To solve the second, the present study makes a quantitative analysis of the qualitative study: D, P and R in the formula first were given numerical values, then the expected weightiness (We) can be obtained; and three parts of a request (a head act, an alerter and modifiers) were given values, too, then the observed weightiness (Wo) can be obtained. The study, therefore, addresses the following questions:1. Does the formula work in predicting the politeness strategies using in the Chinese college students'request behaviors? If so, to what extent does the result observed (Wo) correlate with the expected one (We)?2. Is it true that the more imposing the FTA is, the more effort the speaker will make to mitigate the face threatening force of the intended speech act?3. Is it true that the more distance there is between the speaker and hearer, the more effort the speaker will make to mitigate the face threatening force of the intended speech act?4. Is it true that the more power the hearer has over the speaker, the more effort the speaker will make to mitigate the face threatening force of the intended speech act?This study investigated the request strategies made by 180 (90 male and 90 female) university students. With the instrument of 5-point Scale-response Questionnaire (SRQ), the researcher got the degree of imposition of each act. Then according to the results of SRQ, a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) was made to collect the data that the researcher needs. SPSS 11.5 was used to analyze the correlation of expected weightiness (We) and observed weightiness (Wo). A paired sample t-test for the ranking of imposition (R) and two ANOVA tests for social status (P) and social distance (D) were done to examine the effects of the three factors R, P and D.The results of this study show that the formula of"Computing the Weightiness of FTA"is a valid tool in predicting the use of politeness strategies in requests. However, the effect of the three variables is not the same: the more distance there is between the speaker and hearer, and the more imposing the FTA, the more effort he will make to mitigate the face threatening force of the intended speech act. But the power the hearer has over the speaker does not have significant effect on the politeness strategies.