The Comparative Study Of Speech Act Of Request Between Chinese And American Family Members From Home With Kids And Modern Family

This thesis selects speech act of request as the basic theoretical framework and does the systematic research from the perspectives of alerter, head act and modifications, based upon the data collected in two sitcoms Home with Kids and Modern Family. Then the similarities and differences of request speech act between Chinese and American family members could be summarized, and the reasons for the differences can be analyzed from perspectives of language, society and culture. Finally, the author puts forward some suggestions for second language teaching based on the research.At first, politeness theories, the relative concepts of speech act of request and previous studies about request from home and abroad have been reviewed, which lay a solid theoretical foundation for the following comparison and analysis.The thesis selects the components of speech act of request as the research focus, and mainly discusses the following two questions.(1) What are the similarities and differences of speech act of request from the perspectives of alerter, head act and modifications between Chinese and American family members?(2) What are the factors accounting for the differences between the two?Through analysis of data collected from two sitcoms, request speech act of Chinese and American family members have been analyzed from the perspectives of alerter, head act, modifications. Content analysis and contrast analysis are used in the thesis. The following findings are drawn.About alerter, both Chinese and American family members are inclined to adopt addressing forms. However, there are some differences in choosing addressing forms. American family members mainly choose the first name as the alerter, while Chinese family members are more inclined to use various different addressing forms according to the circumstances, mainly including kinship terms, nick names and so on.About head act, request strategies are discussed and analyzed. The data collected is classified according to the dominance power of speakers and hearers as well as the directness of request speech act. It is found that American family members mainly use conventionally indirect strategy. While in Chinese family, direct strategies are more used from parents to children or between peers. And children use more conventionally indirect strategies to make a request to their parents. And non-conventionally indirect strategies are rarely used in both Chinese and American family.About internal modification, American family members mainly adopt tense & aspect to increase the politeness of request. But there is no tense & aspect in Chinese. Therefore, in Chinese, it depends upon modal particle and polite marker “Nin” to modify the head act. About external modification, the main difference lies on its sequence with the head act; in Chinese, it lies in front of head act, while in English, it lies behind.After summarizing all those differences, the writer analyzes the reasons from the perspectives of language, society, and culture. The language feature, combined with individualism and collectivism, power distance, induction and deduction, high context and low context, are summarized as reasons. Finally, the analysis results are applied into practice to instruct the language teaching so as to enrich the practical value of the research.