An Empirical Study On The Intercultural Style In Chinese & English Requests By Chinese University Students

Interlanguage Pragmatics studies the speech acts of second language learners during their use and acquisition of the second language. The focus of most researches has been on cross-cultural contrast, rather than the mutual influence of the first and second languages during the second language acquisition process. This thesis aims to validate Intercultural Style Hypothesis among Chinese university students by investigating their self-produced Chinese and English requests.The data was analyzed with a coding scheme of requests adapted from the CCSARP by Blum-Kulka et al(1989). However, it is necessary to take a grammatical rule of the Chinese language-Yuqi Ci into account. So we added it into the request strategies coding scheme. Four illocutionary aspects of requests request strategies, alerters, external modification and internal modification were examined to validate the Intercultural Style Hypothesis with qualitative and quantitative analysis.The results show that the Intercultural Style Hypothesis was validated for our research subjects.