A Contrastive Study Of The Speech Act Of Request In Chinese And English

Speech act of request has all the time been one of the most important research fields of pragmatics and sociolinguistics. Scholars at home and abroad have made great achievements in this research field. But till now, all the researches in this field tend to explain the characteristics of request strategies, mentioning little about the syntactic structure and ignoring the response which is an essential part of speech act of request. In this thesis, the author collects the questionnaires designed for the native Chinese students and analyzes the requests and responses they made, trying to cast a comprehensively contrastive study of requests in syntax, semantics, strategy, affecting factors, and responses.The speech act of request is closely related to politeness. Western politeness theories mainly include Leech's Politeness Principles and Brown & Levinson's face theory. Based on the previous research results, we can find that some points in Politeness Principles and face theory are improper in Chinese culture, such as the connotation of face, the content of face, politeness maxims, etc. In this thesis, the author analyzes how they are inappropriate in Chinese culture by a contrastive study of the speech act of request in English and Chinese.This thesis analyzes the causes of the differences from the cultural level, pointing out that such differences are related to the values in different cultures. Chinese society emphasizes the hierarchy and collectivism while Western society equality and individualism. Accordingly, Chinese circular thought pattern and Western linear thought pattern lead to the difference of Chinese inductive discourse and English deductive discourse.In the end, the author makes some pedagogical suggestions for English teaching in order to arouse the English educators'attention in intercultural communication so that English learners improve their communicative competence and avoid pragmatic failures.