A Contrastive Study Of Request Strategies In English And Chinese From The Perspective Of Cross-cultural Pragmatics

Cross-cultural pragmatics is the cross-cultural comparative study on the speechacts under different cultural backgrounds. Request strategy is classified as bald onrecord strategy, conventional indirect request strategy and non-conventional indirectrequest strategy. This thesis studies the differences of the request strategies applied byChinese and the people from English-speaking countries from the perspective ofcross-cultural pragmatics.The study subjects are100Chinese students and100American students. TheChinese group is composed by the students from the institute where the author isstudying. All of the students are freshmen. The American group has done under thehelp of author’s American friend, and whose number and proportion in gender are thesame as those of the Chinese group. The questionnaires sent out are200, of which178are valid. Then, the author takes a qualitative and quantitative analysis on thosequestionnaires. The questionnaires are designed according to the DiscourseCompletion Test(DCT).According the analysis, Chinese subjects and American subjects adopt differentrequest strategies under the same speech context. The factors influencing requeststrategy are collectivism–individualism and power gap. Influenced by Confucianism,Chinese people believe that proper interpersonal relationship is the basis of a request,so they tend to take direct request strategy. People living in English-speakingcountries believe independence and freedom are very important and so tend to takeindirect request strategy. Among the close friends, the people from English-speakingcountries are more likely to express respect for freedom to people’s act by notapplying request. In other words, they are more inclined to "negative" politeness. Onthe other hand, different treatment ways of the Chinese people on distance show ahigher tendency to the "positive" politeness. The understanding of the speakers oneach other’s real personal background information also makes the use of directstrategy appropriate, but also an expected mutually speech act. In Chinese society,even in mutually request between persons in equal relations, he or she often uses imperative sentence structures to achieve “direct request”. Therefore, the directstrategy, especially imperative sentence, is considered as the most impolite strategy bymany scholars, but the conventional indirect strategy is considered as the most politestrategy by the people from English-speaking countries.The first chapter introduces the research status of cross-cultural pragmatics as wellas Chinese and English request strategy both in China and abroad, which points outthe practical significance of the study. The second chapter discusses the fivetheoretical frameworks: cross-cultural pragmatics, request speech act, request strategy,face principle and politeness principle. The third chapter focuses the methodology ofthis study. The fourth chapter analyses the outcome of the study. The fifth chapterconcludes and indicates the limitations of this study.