A Cross-Cultural Contrastive Study On The Speech Act Of Request In Chinese And English

Speech act refers to the act performed by means of utterances, for example, greeting, apology, request, verdict, promise and so on. According to the founder of Speech Act Theory, J. L. Austin and his successor J. Searle, speech acts are the building blocks of social interaction, i.e. speech acts are the basic units of human verbal communication. With the development of world economy, globalization becomes inevitable. Therefore, the communication between people from different countries and regions, i.e. cross-cultural communication will be deeper and wider. However, as their cultural backgrounds and languages are different, such communication will undoubtedly be affected, and misunderstanding or conflicts could be caused. So it is very necessary to study cross-cultural communication, and one of the effective methods is to do research on it by studying the speech acts. In this thesis, a Chinese-English cross-cultural contrastive frame will be set up to study the deep cultural reasons underlying the similarities and differences between the requests in Chinese and English by making use of the research results achieved by scholars from home and abroad so that some references and suggestions could be provided for how we Chinese people can successfully and effectively implement the speech act of request in cross-cultural communication, how to increase the consciousness of cultural differences, how to teach and learn the English language and so on.The thesis consists of an introduction, the body and a conclusion. Its main contents are as the following:The first part is an introduction, which mainly introduces the current status of research on the speech act of request at home and abroad and the significance of studying speech acts from the perspective of culture. The research on requests at home and abroad is currently focused on revealing the similarities and differences between the requests in Chinese and English while there is not enough analysis of the underlying cultural roots. Furthermore, the encoding and implementation of speech acts are closely related to culture. Consequently, it is necessary to set up a Chinese-English cross-cultural contrastive frame to study the speech act of request in both Chinese and English.The second part is the body, which consists of four chapters. In Chapterâ… , the...