A Contrrastive Pragmatic Study Of Request Strateigies In English And Chinese

As the title of this thesis indicates, we attempt to describe and explain the common and different strategies of requests in both English and Chinese in a contrastive approach, which is based on the questionaire survey of English and Chinese native speakers. By the term of strategy, we mean that the speaker is not necessarily seen to use a single choice of expressions in expressing requests, and s/he can be allowed to make full exploitation of whatever strategies s/he wishes to apply for the maximum effect in terms of concrete situations. That is, the choice of vocabulary, grammatical structure, sentence pattern, and the arrangement of the text in order to achieve the desired goal. The study reveals that comparatively Chinese subjects prefer employing direct strategies in requests and are more greatly influenced by power in the choice of strategies. The thesis explores the underlying reasons for the differences manifested in the realization of the speech act of request between Chinese and English from the perspectives of social-cultural values and politeness. Finally it is pointed out that these differences are related to the differences of values between the two cultures, one being individually oriented and the other collectively oriented. The findings of this research testify to the universalistic view of speech acts that the strategies for realizing speech acts and for conveying politeness are more or less the same across languages, but the specific employment of any given strategy varies greatly from culture to culture. Therefore, compared with other existing politeness theories, L. R. Mao's'relative face orientation construct'is an adequate model to address cross-cultural variations concerning linguistic politeness.