Pragmatic Meaning of Requests in English and Chinese

In this book, I study the speech act of requests in English and Chinese. This study compares results between English and Chinese in the realization patterns of this speech act, and between my investigation results and those of the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP). In addition, it is designed to analyse the extent to which the request speech act threatens the participants' face in the two languages, and the extent to which part social variables such as relative power, social distance and some cultural factors play in these interactions. I performed both a linguistic and pragmatic analysis of the data and a socio-cultural analysis. The main framework I follow for data analysis is a combination of theoretical models. In collecting data, a role-play method is employed, complemented by a DCT (Discourse Completion Tests) investigation. The purpose being to analyse differences and similarities between English and Chinese in the realization patterns of the speech act of requests in various situations. The results show that, in the role-play, both English and Chinese favour the direct strategy of interaction. The speech act of requests is found to be multifunctional.