A Study On The Intercultural Style In Chinese&English Bilinguals’ Requests

Requests, as a common communicative act in different languages, are asignificant subject for interlanguage pragmatics. Pragmatics lacks research onthe interaction between the first and second language for Chinese-Englishbilinguals while acquiring the second language. This paper takes Englishlearners at various proficiency levels and studies their speech act ofrequesting in Chinese and English, in order to verify the Hypothesis of anIntercultural Style shared among ordinary English-learning Chineseuniversity students.This paper borrows the analytical framework for the speech act ofrequesting used in the Cross-Cultural Speech Acts Realization Projects(CCSARP) and supplements it with collected real-life language materials.Under the framework, English major and non-English major students’ speechacts of requesting are analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively, focusing onareas of initiators, strategies, external modifiers, and internal modifiers.To some extent, this study verifies the Hypothesis of an InterculturalStyle in the speech act of requesting among bilingual students in Hunan University of Technology. Comparing with the study on students in ShanghaiJiao Tong University by Fan Yanni and Li Bailing (2011), the trend offorming such Intercultural Style is even more obvious in Hunan University ofTechnology. The finding confirms that proficiency levels of the secondlanguage are not positively correlated with the forming of an InterculturalStyle.