A Probe Into Request As A Speech Act

People make requests every day in communication. Requests constitute threats to the hearer's 'face'. When making requests, people often take into consideration such factors as power, age, gender and social distance. Owing to these factors, requests, in most cases, are not made in the form of " I request you to..." People often use different request strategies to make their requests more polite and less offensive.The theory of speech acts plays a very important role in modern linguistics. It focuses on language in use and helps people to know more about requests, especially the use of requests in real life.This paper, based on the theory of speech acts, discusses the proper request strategies and tries to prove, through the comparison between the request strategies in English and Chinese, that there is no universal principle of making requests in different cultures.