A Contrastive Study On The Request Strategies In Chinese And English

This paper attempts to conduct a contrastive study on the realization ofrequests in Chinese context and English context from the pragmaticperspective, with the framework provided by linguists Blum-kulka andHouse. Western scholars have made a multilingual investigation on therequest strategies and found that all languages studied preferredconventionally indirect strategy. While Chinese scholars claims thatChinese did not fit into the frame and developed a new perspective tojustify the conclusion. Through data collecting and data coding, thispaper, with its own proofs and methodology, tries to reach the sameconclusion with other Chinese researchers in this field.A research is included in this paper in which data is collected by theinstrument of observation sheets distributed among altogether 70university students of different majors in two universities. They arerequired to record all the requests they have made, received andoverheard within a week. The data mostly derived from the authenticconversation and is valid for coding and analyzing.To widen the scope of request strategies studies, the reasons for thedifferences in the choice of the request strategies between the Chinesespeakers and English speakers are put forward with the considerationof the politeness theory, proposed by Brown and Levinson (1978 and...