英汉请求策略理论与实证对比研究_刘国辉.docx

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1、4 Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to express my deep gratitude to my supervisor Professor Xiong Xueliang for his valuable and timely feedback about my dissertation, and also for his encouraging words and useful advice throughout the three-year duration of my study at Fudan University. Es

2、pecially his courses on theoretical linguistics, cognitive linguistics and linguistic theories & practices make me gain a better understanding of the frontier linguistic studies. After I finished my draft, he read it through painstakingly over and over again， making lots of corrections and offering

3、some constructive suggestions, without which this dissertation would not come out. Therefore, I attribute all this to him and I take all the responsibility for the mistakes or errors. Furthermore, his strict attitude towards academic research will be of immense value to my future study. My heartfelt

4、 thanks go especially to Professor Qu Weiguo, for his insightful supervision in my research, making me avoid taking efforts to do some useless work. Every time my discussion with him makes me think a lot, in this way my present work becomes better and more convincing. Professor Chu Xiaoquan spends a

5、 lot of time reading my draft carefully and offers some rather valuable suggestions, for which I do appreciate from my very heart. Thanks also go to Professor P. Brown, Professor Arundale, Dr. Jiang Yan, Dr. Gao Yongwei, Dr. Shenli and others for their help with my data collection. Mr. Zhou Shigen,

6、Mrs Huang Yanqing and other departmental staff also give warm and generous support. My predecessors and my associates: Dr. Jiang Yong, Dr. Wang Zhijun, Dr. Wei Han, Dr.Wang Fufang, Mr. Yao Lan, Mrs.Wang Ying, etc. have offered me some valuable ideas and advice to my research work. Lastly, I would li

7、ke to offer my great thanks to my wife and my daughter for their love, constant support and understanding, without which I could not finish my Ph.D. Program at Fudan University. The limited space does not allow me to list all those who ever give me help, forgive me for doing so. 5 Abstract As the ti

8、tle of this dissertation indicates, this dissertation is intended to describe and explain the common and different strategies of requests in both English and Chinese in a contrastive approach, which is based on the questionnaire survey of Americans and Chinese people. Request is chosen mainly becaus

9、e it is widely used in a variety of situations of our daily life. For example, asking somebody to pass the salt at the dinner table, or asking someone to turn down the TV when we are sleeping. From the studies of requests by scholars, such as Lyons (1977), Searle(1979), Leech(1983), Searle & Vanderv

10、eken(1985), Tsui(2000) and our present research, we could arrive at some understanding of requests: requests are attempts on the part of the speaker in discourse to get the hearer to perform cr to stop performing some kind of action, meanwhile the addressee is left with the right to refuse to comply

11、 (see Section 1.3). Note that the requested act is a future act within the reach of the addressee5 s ability. This definition can be fully evidenced in the most popular use of the conventionally indirect strategy in requests. Consider the examples below: (1) 帮我打扫一下厨房，好吗？ (2) Would you mind helping m

12、e clean up the kitchen? By the term of strategy, we dont mean the “disease to please” somebody (To be a nice person, one tries to live up to the requirements of ten should), as described by Braiker (2001), but mean that the speaker is not necessarily seen to use a single choice of expressions in exp

13、ressing requests, s/he can be allowed to make full exploitation of whatever strategy or strategies s/he wishes to apply for the maximum effect in terms of concrete situations. That is, the choice of the vocabulary, grammatical structure, sentence pattern, the arrangement of the text and even the int

14、onation in order to achieve the desired goal. The studies of many scholars, such as Searle (1976), Ervin-Tripp(1977), House (1986), Blum-Kulka (1987), Blum-Kulka & House (1989), Blum-Kulka, et al (1989), Ellis (1994), Liao (1997) and Gibbs (1998) have found that three categories of head request stra

15、tegies are employed widely in daily verbal communication. They are direct (e.g. I want you to shut up. / You911 have to move the car.), conventionally6 indirect (e.g. Lets play a game. / Can you draw a horse for me?) and non-conventionally indirect strategies (e.g. This game is boring. / We have bee

16、n playing this game for over an hour now.). In addition, we add two further categories: opting out and combined strategies because such two categories can be often evidenced in our experiences of interaction. By opting out, we mean that the speakers have the option not to say if they feel they would

17、 not say anything in that particular situation. By combined strategies, we mean that when the speaker requests the addressee to do something, s/he has to employ more than one strategy on some occasions. For example: (3) Hey, Judith, I really need some help, can you please lend me your notes? (direct

18、 + conventionally indirect) (4) 我需要用厨房，你是否可以帮我打扫一下？ (direct + conventionally indirect) Moreover, the use of modifications(intemal and external), tokens, perspectives, address form， “please” and “请 can also be exploited as strategies of a request. In a word, there are three kinds of macro-strategies

19、for requests, they are respectively: head request strategies (e.g. direct and conventionally indirect strategies), parasite strategies (like modifications, tokens and perspectives of requests) and inferring strategies (such as the use of assumption device, rhetorical questions and metonymy). Why do

20、we take the strategies of requests into account? It is mainly because requests are intrinsically face-threatening acts in terms of Brown & Levinson (1978/1987). If requests are not made appropriately, the desired goal may not be reached. Meanwhile the hearer (H) may be embarrassed, or the relationsh

21、ip may be damaged. Other things being equal, generally the larger the request is, the greater the imposition on H. For example, if S asks H to lend him $100, the imposition is greater than that if S asks H to lend him $10. The imposition determined by the size of a request is called absolute imposit

22、ion. However, in actual situations H perceives the size of the request in terms of relative imposition, which is affected by various factors, of which the two relatively most important variables that affect the relative imposition are social distance (familiarity) and social status (power) (Scollon

23、& Scollon, 1983). For instance, if S asks for a loan of $100 from a parent and $10 from a teacher, the teacher might feel more imposed upon than the7 father even though the absolute size of the request is smaller. How to exactly measure the imposition of a request constitutes a real problem because

24、any request is issued in a particular situation, and at the same time it is hard to specify which parameter or parameters play the decisive role. So the imposition is a relatively vague concept, depending on the situational variables. Up to date, there are few studies conducted on cross-cultural req

25、uest strategies between English and Chinese. My present study, generally speaking, is chiefly on the basis of the previous researches of Austin (1962), Searle (1979), Grice (1975), Blum-Kulka, House & Kasper (1989), Song Mei, Lee-Wong(2000), Brown & Levinson (1987), Gu (1990, 1992), Liao Chao-chih (

26、1997), Montserrat (1999)， Sifinou (1992)， Tsui (2000)， Thomas (1983)， Tsohatzidis (1994)， 翟学伟 (1995)， 袁毓林 (1993)， 毕继万 (1996a, 1996b)， 曲卫国、陈流芳 (1999a， 1999b， 2001)， 熊学亮 (1999,2000)，熊学亮，刘国辉 (2000, 2001， 2002)， 刘国辉 (1999, 2000, 2001a， 2001b， 2002)， 刘国辉，蒋勇(2000)，陈松岑 （ 2001) and others. And we intend to

27、let other people get familiar with the features of Chinese request behavior. Finally, we want to confirm the fact that no language or culture is more polite than any other. In other words, although the study may appear to be exclusively concerned with the description and comparison of the English an

28、d Chinese cultural and linguistic systems, it is intended to support the general claim that, despite popular national stereotypes, no nation may be objectively verified as more or less polite than any other, but only polite in a different, culturally specific way. For instance, when an American prai

29、ses your wife, saying Your wife is very beautifulin the light of the American way of communicative style, you might respond with, No, No, No. However, such response is not acceptable by native speakers of English. Therefore, it? s rather important to develop a kind of cross-cultural pragmatic awaren

30、ess. There were three groups of subjects (totalling 324) taking part in this study: a group of NSs of English (AM) with 84 students, 33 males to 51 females and a group of Chinese learners of English(IL) with 128 students, 16 males to 112 females and a group of NSs of Chinese(CHN) with 112 students,

31、64 males to 48 females. The questionnaires were provided in English and Chinese versions with the English one for NSs of English and IL groups, the Chinese one for NSs of Chinese, respectively. It took subjects about 35 minutes to complete the questionnaire required. Our study employs twelve situati

32、ons, based on situations used in previous 8 studies so as to validate them (see Section 3.4.2). These situations embrace all of the social relationships in actual verbal communication， as shown in Ikble 3-1. Concerning the validity of the questionnaire data in this study， I would like to mention the

33、 following points: first of all, we have to admit that the data we utilized are no doubt based on the materials of Western scholars, to some extent, reflecting Western cultural bias. However, these twelve situations, not unique to Western cultures, we often encounter in our daily life, also. Finally

34、, these situations have taken into account various parameters or variables like social distance, dominance, age, sex? etc., which are involved in our real discourse, too. The instrument called a discourse completion test (DCT) is used to elicit information from the students about their ability to pr

35、oduce requests. This format was first developed by Levenston (1975) to test oral proficiency of adult immigrants moving to Canada. Just as Kasper & Dahl (1991) point out, the DCT has enjoyed unparalleled popularity in speech act pragmatics research. Out of the 35 studies of speech act production rev

36、iewed by them, 11 studies (31%) used DCT as the sole source of data and an additional 8 studies used them as one of the means of collecting data. Thus, DCT was used in 54%(19 out of 35) of the studies. In contrast, only 2 of the 35 studies, or just under 6%, used observation of natural language excl

37、usively. This is mainly because the DCT has enjoyed the following strengths of its own (Wolfson, et al. 1989: 183-184): (1) gathering a large amount of data quickly; (2) creating an initial classification of semantic formulas and strategies that will occur in natural speech; and (3) studying the ste

38、reotypical perceived requirements for a socially appropriate response. Through our research, we do find some similarities and differences in the use of request strategies among the three groups: AM, IL and CHN. The similarities are: 1 Both languages employ the same formal means in requests, includin

39、g interrogatives, declaratives and imperatives. The priority choice pattern of them is: interrogatives declarativesimperatives. 2 Both languages employ the same strategies in requests, covering direct, conventionally indirect, non-conventionally indirect, opting out and combined 9 strategies. The pr

40、iority order of them is: conventionally indirectdirectcombined non-conventionally indirectopting out. As for combined strategies, D+Ind.Ind.+Ind.Ind.+DD+D is the most popularly used pattern. 3 Both languages utilize modifications to the head requests, encompassing pre-modifications and post-modifica

41、tions. And pre-modifications are employed far more than post-modifications. 4 The mean tokens among three groups generally take 3.45 to 3.85 semantic units, both the AM and CHN groups score the largest number of tokens in S5 with 4.93 and 4.95 respectively. 5 Both languages use speaker-dominant and

42、hearer-oriented perspectives in requests widely. 6 Both languages exploit initiating markers of requests like address form, “sorry” ， “Please” or 请 ” in requests. “Excuse me” and (Im) sorry” in English or “ 对不 起 in Chinese are usually used in three situations S6， S7 and SI 1. However, “Please” or 请

43、” in requests is not used indiscriminately on any occasions, not so often as we have expected. 7 Both languages make use of positive, negative and null responses in request responses. The use of positive responses is far more than negative and null responses. The preferential order of responses by t

44、he three groups can be ranked as: positivenegativenull. As for the reasons why the two languages show such kind of common features in requests, we think that all human beings observe the optimality theory (OT), i.e. selecting the one that incurs the least violations of conflicting constraints. Gener

45、ally, there are three kinds of communicative ends to be achieved in our verbal interaction: (a) effectiveness; (b) effectiveness and interpersonal politeness; and (c) interpersonal politeness. The optimal choice of requesting strategies is actually the result of direct, conventionally indirect, non-

46、conventionally indirect， combined and opting out strategies competing against each other in the constraints of the above three different communicative aims, that is, the most optimal one is most harmonic with respect to all factors concerned. Consult Section 4.13 for 10 more details. Their differenc

47、es are: 11 1 The AM group uses more interrogatives (58.04% to 48.96%) and the CHN group uses more declaratives (28.87% to 25.89%) and imperatives (14.73% to 9.52%) in requests. 2 The CHN group likes to use more direct strategy(for in-groups) than the AM group, and the AM group loves to use more conv

48、entionally indirect strategy(for in-groups and out-groups), but the CHN group is fond of employing more non-conventionally indirect strategy(for out-groups) than the AM group. As for the combined strategies of requests, the CHN group is at the top with 13.10%, whereas the AM group with 10.70% and th

49、e IL group with 10.16%. 3 Compared with the AM group, the CHN group uses a little bit more pre-modifications with 1.76 to 1.69. However, the IL group climbs to the top of the three, reaching 1.83. The CHN group obtains the largest number in the use of external modification, more than the AM group with 0.84 to 0.69. 4 Generally, the number of tokens used by the AM group goes beyond those of the CHN and the IL groups with 3.85 to 3.45 and 3.54 respectively. Additionally, the females use more to