A Contrastive Study On The Speech Act Of Request Between Chinese And British University Students

Politeness has been studied by scholars from several fields since the 1970s with a great many outstanding achievements. The Speech Act of Request is closely linked with politeness theory. At the moment, Leech's politeness theory and Brown and Levinson's Face-saving Theory are very influential. Quite a few scholars have done much research on request strategies, however, there is little research on off-record request. Consequently, the paper is concerned with request strategies between Chinese and British university students, especially off-record request from the perspective of cross-cultural pragmatics by means of questionnaire surveys.Based on the questionnaire survey, the writer makes a contrastive study on the differences between British students and Chinese students while they are performing speech act of request and off-record request. The research will mainly answer the following three questions:(1)Are there any differences between Chinese and British university students while they are using request strategies?(2)Are there any differences in terms of the responses to the request, especially to the off-record requests between Chinese and British university students? If there exist any differences, then what are the differences of the responses to the request strategies, particularly to the off-record request between Chinese and British university students?This study sets out six scenarios, which are selected from Requests and Culture written by Saeko Fukushima, Japanese. The scenarios happen between instructor and student, student and student, colleague and colleague and so on. Totally,121 students from each country participate in the research. The data of the subjects from the University of Reading are adopted from Requests and Culture by Saeko Fukushima while the data of the subjects from Xinhua College are collected by the writer. After the data are analyzed and processed by SPSS, the author comes to the results as follows: (1) The request strategies used by Chinese and British university students are different. In in-groups, the Chinese subjects use more direct request strategies than those of the British while in out-groups the British subjects use more direct request strategies.(2)There exist significant differences in the choice of the responses to the request strategies, particularly the responses to off-record request between Chinese and British university students. Generally speaking, Chinese students show more solicitousness than the British.The thesis is composed of six chapters. Chapter one gives a brief introduction to the thesis which includes the origin, purpose and significance of the study and the organization of the paper. Chapter two is literature review that offers a brief review of the theoretical background to the current studies of politeness theories, the speech act of request and contrastive pragmatic studies on request both at home and abroad. Chapter three explains the methodology that is adopted in the study, which gives detailed methods about how to handle the questions the author has presented. Chapter four focuses on results. Chapter five is discussion which is discussed from the prospect of culture. The last chapter is conclusion that summarizes the major findings of the study, provides implications of the study as well as limitations and suggestions for the future study.