A Comparative Study Of Request Speech Act Between Chinese And American Family Members

The speech act is an integral part in social communication and the request speech act gets more significantly wide attention.This systematic study is unfolded from the perspectives of the head act,alerter and the modifications in an attempt to figure out the differences and similarities of the request speech act between Chinese and American family members.Also,this study analyzes the reasons that cause the different aspects of the request speech act between Chinese and American family members from the perspectives of language factors,social and culture factors.This study utilizes the speech act theories,request speech act theories and the politeness principles from home and abroad as its solid theoretical foundation in order to compare and analyze the differences and similarities of the request speech act between Chinese and American family members.For the head act comparison,this study concludes that Chinese parents are more likely to use direct strategy when they produce requests to their children;however,Chinese children tend to use conventionally indirect strategy more often when they perform certain request speech acts to their parents.For the alerter comparison,both Chinese and American family members prefer to use addressing forms.But,some differences of the addressing form selections between Chinese and American family members still exist.Based on different situations or different personal relationships,Chinese family members utilize a variety of addressing forms to show the speaker's respect or the intimacy between the speaker and hearer.For the modifications,which include internal modification and external modification,most of Chinese request speech acts do not have tense;however,American people prefer to use tense in an attempt to increase and decrease the degree of politeness.So,Chinese people choose to use modal particles or politeness symbols to modify the request speech acts.This study also illustrates the external modification,which can be distinguished through different sequences of the head acts.Specifically,the supportive move usually lies in front of the head act in Chinese request speech acts.On the contrary,the supportive move lies behind the head act in American request speech acts.Except for these three perspectives that have been mentioned above,this study provides other factors that can also influence the differences and similarities of the request speech act between Chinese and American family members,such as culture differences and language differences.The social factor is also included in this part.The pragmatic value of this comparative study is that its findings can be applied into second language teaching,which can improve the learning efficiency of the request speech act.