A Pragmatic Analysis Of Strategies In English Requests

People often make requests in the process of human social interaction, whererequests are intended to pray for others to do something. Request belongs to theindicative of Speech Act. The use of request at the same time is bound to theapplication of request strategies that determines the success of request or not. For thestudy on request strategies, most of them are based on DCT, MCQ and SRQ, and yetthe researches on conversation in daily life as the corpus are few. Therefore, it isnecessary to analyze requests systematically so as to ensure day-to-daycommunication smoothly.The present study is based on Speech act theory and realized by theoreticalframework CCSARP (Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Patterns) thatinvestigated by Blum-Kulka, House&Kasper in1989to qualitatively analyze thedaily conversation in Desperate Housewives as the corpus. It aims at revealing whatfactors influence the choice of request strategies, how they work on strategies andwhat do people prefer to employ. J.L.Austin puts forward the basic ideas on speechact theory in How to Do Things with Words in1962. At the beginning of the theory, heregards some sentences included performative verbs as performatives. In the sameway, he names the act with verb “request" as doing requesting speech act. J.R.Searledevelops speech act theory and makes a classification of illocutionary speech acts,including assertive, directives, commissives, expressives and declarations. Requestingspeech act belongs to directives. Blum-Kulka, House&Kasper have done CCSARP(Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Patterns) which is to analyze two kinds ofspeech act: requests and apologies in different cultures. Three strategies are proposedin making requests: direct strategy, conventionally indirect strategy andunconventionally indirect strategy. Through analyzing and arranging the corpusDesperate Housewives, it can be seen that these five strategies are influenced by initiating markers, situational variations and major variables, how these factors impacton the choice of request strategies and what strategies are preferred in differentsituations.The study shows: the major factors that make impact on the use of requeststrategy are initiating markers, situation, social distance, dominance, controllability ofacts, age and sex. In different circumstances, request strategy will change. However,Americans tend to employ conventionally indirect strategy in daily life and thetendency that female chooses direct strategy is becoming higher with the developmentof the society.