A Study Of Politeness Strategies Of Chinese Direct Requests

Making requests is a common practice in our daily life.Up to now,scholars have conducted various studies to explore how people make requests and why they make such choices.Most of the scholars focus on the macro level,that is,the degree of in/directness of request strategies,and agree with Brown and Levinson’s(1978,1987)claim that the underlying motivation for requesters to make requests politely is to save the requestees’ face.These,however,have some limitations.First,restricting research focus to the macro-level strategies cannot fully reveal the politeness mechanism of requests-making in the Chinese context.This is because some scholars have found that at the macro level,direct requests account for a large proportion in the Chinese context.However,this never means that Chinese people are brusque or rude.In fact,various kinds of modification devices are often employed to mitigate the illocutionary force of direct requests.However,these micro-level politeness strategies are rarely studied.Second,the overemphasis on face ignores other relational considerations underlying people’s use of different politeness strategies in making requests.To fill the research gaps,this study aims to find out whether direct requests are favored by Chinese people.If the answer is yes,are they mitigated by politeness strategies?And what types of politeness strategies are employed?For a further step,to catch up with the development of politeness theory,the reasons underlying the use of these politeness strategies are explored from the relational perspective with reference to Spencer-Oatey’s(2008)Rapport Management Theory.To answer the above questions,the qualitative approach was adopted.With the Chinese TV series—Moment in Peking as the source of data,this study totally collected 428 request fragments.First,all the requests were classified into three macro categories(direct requests,conventional indirect requests and non-conventional indirect requests)based on Blum-Kulka et al.’s(1989)classification.Then,focusing on direct requests,all of them were categorized into two groups:requests mitigated by politeness strategies and those unmitigated.With mitigated direct requests as focus,the politeness strategies attached were classified into different types in terms of Brown and Levinson’s(1978,1987)Politeness Theory.Finally,the underlying reasons reflected by the use of these politeness strategies were explored from Spencer-Oatey’s(2008)Rapport Management Theory.The research findings are summarized as follows:(1)Direct requests are most frequently used,and most of them are mitigated by various kinds of politeness strategies.(2)Based on Brown and Levinson(1978,1987),five super-strategies and eleven sub-strategies are identified.Among the super-strategies,"Avoiding coercion"is most frequently used by requesters.Among the sub-strategies,"Minimize the imposition" is the most popular one.What is notable is that all the politeness strategies can be used in combination to tactfully raise the level of politeness of direct requests.(3)Different from Brown and Levinson’s overemphasis on face,this study finds that from the relational perspective,Spencer-Oatey’s(2008)face,social rights and obligations and interactional goals better explain the motivations underlying Chinese requesters’use of politeness strategies.This study has both theoretical and practical significance.Theoretically,first,this study is a systematic exploration of direct requests in the Chinese context,especially of the modification devices.Different from studies which are based on Blum-Kulka et al.’s(1989)classification of modifiers,Brown and Levinson’s(1978,1987)classification of politeness strategies is creatively adopted as the coding scheme of this study so as to reveal the different politeness functions embedded in those modification devices.Second,this thesis helps to improve Brown and Levinson’s Politeness Theory from two aspects.On the one hand,based on the Chinese data,some adjustments are made to the politeness strategies proposed by Brown and Levinson,avoiding the Western-biased classification which is mainly derived from the Western practice.On the other hand,since Brown and Levinson’s overemphasis on the role of individual face in explaining people’s use of politeness strategies fails to take other relational factors into consideration,the Politeness Theory is complemented with Spencer-Oatey’s(2008)Rapport Management Model,which reinterprets the notion of face and broadens dimensions of politeness management by adding another two factors—social rights and obligations and interactional goals.In this way,Brown and Levinson’s Politeness Theory will be better suited to explain Chinese politeness phenomena in making requests.Practically,first,this study provides guidance to people on how to make requests politely.Second,this study can help to improve foreigners’ understanding of the politeness mechanism behind requests-making in the Chinese context,and thus facilitate international exchange.