Gender Differences In Chinese Perceived From The Speech Act Of Request

This paper is aimed at detecting gender differences through speech act theory in pragmatics. Speech act theory created by Austin and Searle suggests that"to say something is to do something". So speech act emphasizes the roles interlocutors play in the process of communication. Depending on different addressers, the structure, type and strategy of certain speech act will display different attributes. By analyzing different attributes of certain speech act, we can perceive different cultural and social backgrounds of the addressers. To be specific, this paper is to observe the way males and females making requests and responding to requests by questionnaire investigation. The investigated results will be interpreted under the framework of"face work"proposed by Brown and Levinson."Face work"includes"positive face"and"negative face". Making requests belongs to"negative face threatening act"; accepting requests belongs to"positive face strengthening act"; refusing requests belongs to"positive face threatening act". From the way how males and females deal with these acts, we can see how they care about"face"and what"politeness strategies"they adopt. From different"politeness strategies"they adopt, the social and cultural backgrounds will be touched in this paper.The study in this paper adopts questionnaire investigation and quantitative analysis. The questionnaire investigation uses modified DCT to fit the language habit of Chinese subjects and takes multiple choices as the supplement. The subjects in this study are divided into two groups, male group and female group and the only variable between the two groups of subjects is gender. The data collected is analyzed quantitatively using some concept of statistics such as average and MD. Also, tables and graphics which can demonstrate the results intuitively are introduced. The analyzed results are discussed under the framework of face work proposed by Brown and Levinson. The discussion shows that in making request, females are more polite and more likely to place themselves as subordinate to their addressees. In accepting requests, females speak more and put more value on the addressees'wants, thus pay more attention to the other's"positive face". Moreover, females are more polite in refusing requests and males are more sensitive of their superodinate positions. The features displayed in the discussion of the results obtained from the questionnaire investigation could reflect the social reality that female has lower social status than male.This paper fills the voids of past studies concerning gender differences in language and requests. Choosing Chinese requests as the tool sheds lights on applying western pragmatics to Chinese researches and developing pragmatics in Chinese. However, this paper has some limitations in the aspects of the written form and the setting. Based on the limitations in this paper, further studies could improve the method and employ more scientific method such as recording the conversation of the subjects. Gender differences in Chinese perceived from other speech acts such as apology and compliment could be the topics of further studies. In addition, this paper provides some enlightenment on inter-cultural communication and stimulates the interests of more scholars to study gender differences inter-culturally.