Analysis Of The Differences Between Chinese And English Request Speech Act

Based on the speech act theory, this thesis, from the perspective of syntactic level, discourse level and interactive modal, gives an analysis of the differences between English and Chinese. The reasons for the differences lie in linguistic social and cultural elements.The thesis first gives a brief introduction to speech act theory, introduces Austin’s and Searle’s speech act theory. In brief, the theory of Austin is "to say something is to do something at the same time". This theory connected language with the behavior of people together, which was a special contribution that Austin gave in the realm of the language philosophy. The American philosopher-Searle inherited and developed this theory. Speech act theory raised by Searle focuses on such two features as systematization and standardization, and made it influence the development of contemporary philosophy, logics and linguistics profoundly. The theory of speech act by Austin and Searle has the important meaning in the development of the language philosophy.In this thesis, the writer chooses requests as the subject and has a detailed analysis on request speech act types. The writer also refers to a lot of other scholars’researches. Based on above research, the writer makes a contrast between Chinese and English request speech act in different linguistic levels, then finds that the conventional indirect strategy is used the most by English-speakers.After comparison, the writer found that generally speaking American people are more informal and direct than Chinese. The choices of Chinese request strategies are either too direct, or too indirect; implication strategy is often used to make a request. Reasons for the differences between Chinese and English request strategies are:linguistic elements, social elements and cultural elements. Confucianism could be regarded as the representative Chinese philosophical culture and the Rationalism the American philosophical culture.The conclusion drawn finally is that there is no distinction of advantages and disadvantages in the strategies of the speech act of request, and the distinction is mainly caused by the cultural differences. Acquiring more knowledge of the similarities and differences between the speech strategies of China and western countries contributes to people’s understanding of the western cultures. As for as language learners and communicators are concerned, only by intensifying their cultural consciousness and integrating the language study and cultural study; meanwhile cultivating the communicative techniques, can they gurantee a successful intercultural communication.