Pragmatic Analysis Of Request Speech Acts In A Dream Of Red Mansions

Ever since Speech Act Theory was proposed by Austin in1962and developed by Searle in1969, a considerable number of empirical studies have been conducted regarding request speech acts, most of which are investigated in the cross-cultural context or from the perspective of interlanguage pragmatics. Few are studied in the Chinese context, let alone Chinese literary works. In order to fill in the research gap, the present study intends to examine the request utterances in A Dream of Red Mansions in an attempt to enrich the pragmatic study of request speech acts and to provide a new perspective for the study of "Redology"The present study focuses on the following three aspects:(1) characteristics and manifestations of request strategies in the Chinese context;(2) pragmatic devices people employ to mitigate the contradiction between request and politeness;(3) factors contributing to people’s choice of different request strategies and modifications. Altogether319utterances taken from A Dream of Red Mansions (Yang Xianyi&Gladys Yang,1999) that contain requests are extracted, classified and analyzed.Elaborate analysis of the collected data indicates that:(1) People constantly show a preference for direct request strategies in the Chinese context. As for manifestations of request strategies, mood derivable and query preparatory rank higher in occurrence than others. The former is characteristic of the use of causative verbs and the latter always presents in the form of declaratives plus a tag question.(2) In order to mitigate the contradiction between request and politeness, people apply mitigating devices of internal modifiers, external modifiers and address terms. The most frequently used sub-modifiers are politeness marker, grounder and compliment. The most commonly used address terms are kinship terms and honorifics.(3) Influencing factors that account for people’s choice of different request strategies and modifications include:social factor of rigid hierarchy system, cultural factor of Confucianism and Collectivism, and psychological factor of characters’personal traits. The findings of the present study can provide partial supporting evidence for previous research on request and can add to the current knowledge in the realization of request speech act from different cultural angels. It can also provide theoretical implication for the pragmatic study of other Chinese classics. However, the present study does not touch on the inner motivation for people’s implementing requests. Future studies are expected to further explore request speech acts in light of cognitive linguistics.