A Gender-based Study Of The Speech Act Of Requests

The present study applies Austin's theory of Speech Acts, Brown & Levinson's Politeness theory and Blum-Kulka's coding scheme of analyzing request to explore whether males and females differ in request behaviors.This thesis makes an analysis of the request behaviors of males and females on three levels of request, namely, request strategy, request sequence, and request perspective by collecting a total of 408-request speech acts from five English series plays and ten English movies. This thesis points out that gender differences do exist. Besides, some social variables are examined on three levels and proved to interact with the gender and affect the request behavior of males and females. Then a tentative interpretation of the results with a combination of Politeness Theory and relevant theories of sociolinguistics is given. It is suggested by this thesis that the gender differences may partly due to the different roles men and women play in society as well as the different perceptions of the face behavior.This thesis makes a valuable contribution to the second language teaching. In English teaching, teachers should help students realize the gender differences in language use, and improve their cross-gender communicative competence. Lastly, this thesis is helpful for people's understanding of daily communication and may also help people improve their communicative effects, which can make cross-gender communication go more smoothly.