硕士学位论文

汉英请求言语行为对比研究

A Contrastive Study of the Speech Act of Request

in Chinese and English

童修文

哈尔滨工业大学
2007 年 7 月
国内图书分类号：H319.5
国际图书分类号：802.0

文学硕士学位论文

汉英请求言语行为对比研究

硕 士 研 究 生 ： 童修文

导 师 ： 贾玉新教授

申 请 学 位： 文学硕士

学 科 、 专 业 ： 外国语言学及应用语言学

所 在 单 位 ： 外国语学院

答 辩 日 期 ： 2007 年 7 月 5 日

授予学位单位： 哈尔滨工业大学
 Classified Index: H 319.5
U.D.C.: 802.0

Graduation Thesis for the M. A. Degree

A Contrastive Study of the Speech Act of

Request in Chinese and English

Candidate: Tong Xiuwen

Supervisor: Prof. Jia Yuxin

Academic Degree Applied for: Master of Arts

Specialty: Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics

Affiliation: Dept. of Foreign Languages

Date of Defence: July 5, 2007

Degree Conferring Institution : Harbin Institute of Technology

 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

摘要
请求言语行为一直是语用学和社会语言学研究的重要领域之一，国内外学
者在该领域的研究已取得丰硕的成果。但长期以来这一领域的研究都侧重于
探讨请求策略的特征，对于句法结构则很少涉及，而对于请求言语行为的反
应这一密不可分的部分，更是未曾涉足。本文通过问卷调查, 对以汉语为母语
的中国学生请求言语行为及其回应方式的特征进行整理分析，试图对英汉请
求言语行为在句法、语义、策略、影响因素和反应方略等方面做一个全面的
对比研究。
请求言语行为和礼貌原则密不可分。西方礼貌理论主要包括 Leech 的礼貌
原则与 Brown 和 Levinson 的面子理论，根据前人的研究成果，我们发现，礼
貌原则与面子理论中有些地方不适用于中国文化，诸如面子的内涵、面子的
内容、礼貌准则等。本文通过对英汉请求言语行为的对比研究，分析这些地
方如何不适合中国文化。
本文从文化的角度揭示了形成这些差异的原因，指出这些差异与中西两种
不同文化的价值观的差异有关，因为中国社会强调差序格局，而西方倡导平
等；中国是一个注重群体的社会，而西方社会则注重个体；与之相适应，中
国的圆式思维方式和西方的线型思维导致英汉语篇上呈现演绎式和归纳式的
区别。
最后，本文对当今的英语教学提了几点建议，希望能够引起广大英语教育
工作者的重视，提高英语学习者的交际能力，避免跨文化交际失误的发生。

关键词：请求言语行为；礼貌；文化；对比

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Abstract
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

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communication so that English learners improve their communicative competence

and avoid pragmatic failures.

Key words: speech act of request; politeness; culture; contrast

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Contents
Chinese Abstract .................................................................................................. I
English Abstract..................................................................................................II

Chapter 1 Introduction .......................................................................................1

1.1 The Significance of a Culturally Contrastive Study of Requests ...1
1.2 Previous Studies of Requests at Home and Abroad .......................2
1.3 Aims of the Thesis ......................................................................... 3
1.4 Organization of the Thesis .............................................................4
Chapter 2 Literature Review ..............................................................................6
2.1 Speech Act Theory ......................................................................... 6
2.1.1 Austin’s theory...................................................................... 6
2.1.2 Searle’s theory ...................................................................... 7
2.2 The Speech Act of Request ............................................................ 8
2.2.1 Structure of request ............................................................... 9
2.2.2 Three levels of request strategies........................................ 10
2.2.3 Request perspectives........................................................... 11
2.3 Politeness Theories ...................................................................... 12
2.3.1 Leech’s Politeness Principles.............................................. 13
2.3.2 B & L’s face-saving theory ................................................. 14
2.3.3 Non-universality of Leech and B&L’s politeness theories..16
Chapter 3 Reseach Design and Result Analysis .............................................. 20
3.1 Research Design .......................................................................... 20
3.1.1 Subjects............................................................................... 20
3.1.2 Instrument ........................................................................... 20
3.2 Result Analysis ............................................................................ 21
3.2.1 Syntactic Comparison ......................................................... 21
3.2.2 Semantic Comparison ......................................................... 27
3.2.3 Strategic Comparison.......................................................... 36
3.2.4 Affecting factors ................................................................. 45
3.2.5 Request response................................................................. 49
Chapter 4 Cultural Analysis ............................................................................. 53
4.1 Hierarchy v.s. Equality................................................................. 53
4.2 Collectivism v.s. Individualism.................................................... 55
4.3 Inductive v.s. Deductive............................................................... 57
Chapter 5 Conclusion ........................................................................................61
References .......................................................................................................... 67

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Appendix I Questionnaire of Requests (the English version) ........................72

Appendix II Questionnaire of Requests (the Chinese version) ......................74
Appendix III The Original Chinese Letter for Chapter Three ......................76
Letter of Declaration ......................................................................................... 77
Statement of Copyright ..................................................................................... 77
Acknowledgements ............................................................................................ 78

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Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 The Significance of a Culturally Contrastive Study of

Requests
With the development of modern science and technology, international
communication becomes more and more frequent. As a big market, China attracts
many foreigners and lots of foreign enterprises spread all over the country. This
globe becomes a village in which people need to travel across countries and work
with people from different countries. In big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, many
intellects are working in international enterprises and many students are expecting
to work there after their graduation. With good mastery of the basic skills of
language, including listening, speaking, reading and writing, they are encouraged
to negotiate with foreigners in various aspects; however, failures often take place
when they communicate with foreigners, which directly lead to great loss to their
companies and/or themselves. Lacking the realization of different cultural
background, they act according to their own cultural rules; consequently, they even
fail in the communication of very simple affairs. It is reported that once a Chinese
employee wanted to ask for a leave of absence for one day in order to look after
his sick mother. He told his American boss much information about his mother’s
illness but did not tell him his purpose. Finally the boss asked him impatiently,
“Bloody hell man, what do you want?” He thought that most probably he could not
leave since he had told his boss so much about his reasons for his request but the
boss did not show any sign of permission and thus left with an answer, “Nothing,
sir.”

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That was a typical cross-cultural communication failure of request. Under

different cultural background, Chinese people and native English speakers make
their requests differently. Chinese people often give their reasons first before
making a request while native English speakers do in an opposite way. The
pragmatic transfer of the Chinese employee, who used English in the way of his
mother tongue, led to the loss of his American boss. The Employee failed his
communication with his American boss even before he made his request. Such
communication failures originate from the non-existence of a culturally
contrastive analysis of the speech acts. As request is one of most frequent speech
acts, a culturally contrastive study of requests is more necessary. This thesis will
make a culturally contrastive study of requests, from which many people may get
lots of benefits.

1.2 Previous Studies of Requests from Home and Abroad

Many scholars from home and abroad have done a lot of researches in the field of
speech act of request. The most important foreign figures include Ervin-tripp and
Blum-Kulka. In 1976, Ervin-tripp did a systematic research of English requests
and divided English request strategies into six types: needs statements, imperatives,
imbedded imperatives, permission directives, non-explicit question directives, and
hints. In 1984, in order to investigate the similarities and differences of speech act
in different languages, Blum-Kulka and Olshtain did a research project named
“Request and Apologies: A Cross-Cultural Study of Speech Act Realization
Patterns (CCSARP)” in which requests and apologies were compared across many
languages. By the research method of “Discourse Completion Test”, they divided
the request strategies into three big types which consists of nine smaller sub-types
and reached the conclusion that conventionally indirect strategies were the most

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preferred strategies in English and it was universal in different cultures. In 1989,

Blum-Kulka, J. House, and G. Kasper did another research and pointed out the
social factors that affect the choices of request strategies.
In China, many scholars also carried out very important researches in this field.
The most important figures are Zhang Shaojie and Wang Xiaotong, who used the
“Discourse Completion Test” for Chinese requests and reached the conclusion that
conventionally indirect strategies are also the commonest and politest strategies in
Chinese. They also analyzed the structure of requests, the social factors affecting
the choices of request strategies and cultural features in requests. Later, Li Jun,
Song Mei Lee-Wong and Gao Hong also made contributions to the research of
requests.

1.3 Aims of the Thesis

This thesis aims at analyzing the similarities and differences of requests between
English and Chinese in order to display the different features of requests in these
two languages. Till now, many scholars have made comparisons on requests
between English and Chinese but they mainly focus on the request strategies. The
syntactic features are seldom compared between these two languages, and request
response, an essential part of request, were hardly mentioned in previous
researches. This thesis plans to make a systematic comparison of requests between
English and Chinese so that a full outline of requests can be viewed. It is supposed
that these aspects will be compared: request syntax, request semantics, request
strategies and affecting factors, as well as request responses.
Language is a part of culture. Culture, the base for language, guides the
customs, values and behaviors of peoples and thus accounts for the different
manifestations of the same notions in different languages. Therefore, this thesis

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will examine the Occidental culture and Oriental culture related to speech act of
requests. We will take a systematic analysis of cultural factors which underlie the
requests of English and Chinese and investigate their cultural differences.
Politeness is very closely related to requests. Leech (1983) divided
illocutionary acts into four groups: competitive, convivial, collaborative and
conflictive. Request belongs to the competitive group and its essence is the
competition between politeness and language. It is impolite intrinsically because
the speaker asks the hearer to do something. Consequently, many scholars used
speech acts as evidences for their politeness principles or theories. This thesis will
start an overview of the western politeness theories from Leech’s politeness
principles and find out some points whose universalities are not proper in Chinese
language and culture. The differences of requests will be used as evidences to
prove the viewpoints.

1.4 Organization of this Thesis

This thesis is composed of five parts. Chapter One introduces the reasons why it is
necessary for us to make a culturally contrastive study of requests, the previous
work done in this field at home and abroad, what this thesis tries to achieve, and
how it is organized.
Chapter Two takes an overview of the literature including speech act theories,
the speech act of requests and politeness theories. For speech act theories, both
Austin’s theory and Searle’s will be examined. For request itself, we will examine
the structure of request, the three-level strategies, and request perspectives. Then,
we’ll view the most important politeness theories both at home and abroad, mainly
Leech’s Politeness Principles, Brown & Levison’s face theory, and Gu’s five
maxims of politeness. Finally, we will point out the main points about the

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non-universality of Western politeness theories, trying to prove them in the

following chapters.
Chapter Three makes a research on Chinese request, analyzes the result and
compares the features of English requests and Chinese requests. We adopt the
DCT in CCSARP and make some adjustments for our research design and employ
the results for our comparison of requests in syntax, semantics, strategy, affecting
factors and responses. The non-universality of western politeness theories is
reflected in our analysis.
Chapter Four makes a cultural analysis for non-universality of western
politeness theories based on the differences and similarities of Chinese requests
and English requests. We choose Power Distance and Individualism from Geert
Hofstede’s four dimensions and thought pattern which may be considered as a
derived one for our analysis as these three dimensions are closely related to our
gist. Therefore, hierarchy versus equality, collectivism versus individualism, and
inductive versus deductive will be analyzed in both Occidental culture and
Oriental culture.
Chapter Five is a conclusion which summarizes the findings of the thesis, in
order to make Chinese people aware of the differences and meanwhile the thesis
provides some pedagogical suggestions.

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Chapter 2 Literature Review

2.1 Speech Act Theory
Speech act theory, a great contribution to cross-cultural communication, was
initiated by the British philosopher J. L. Austin in the late 1950s. J. Searle, his
student, developed speech act theory in 1960s. This part will introduce Austin’s
theory and Searle’s theory one by one.

2.1.1 Austin’s theory

Austin (1962) first distinguished constative from performative utterances.
According to Austin, a constative utterance serves to state a fact, report that
something is the case, or describe what something is. For example, the sentence
“He goes to school every day.” does not ask “He” in the sentence to do anything,
but tells us the fact that every day he goes to school. On the contrary, a
performative utterance performs an action when it is spoken. For example, by the
sentence “I admit that I was wrong.”, people intend to perform the admission
instead of just stating it. Therefore, we are performing actions when we are
speaking. Austin suggests that statements are merely one kind of speech act, that
any statements, if only they are uttered in appropriate circumstances, may be
regarded as implicit performatives. According to Austin’s theory, a speaker might
be performing three acts simultaneously when speaking: locutionary act,
illocutionary act, and perlocutionary act. The locutionary act “includes the
utterance of certain noises, the utterance of certain words in a certain construction
and the utterance of them with a certain ‘meaning’” (Austin, 1962: 94). In other
words, the locutionary act is the act of uttering words, phrases, clauses. It is the act
of conveying literal meaning by means of syntax, lexicon and phonology. The

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illocutionary act is the act of expressing the speaker’s intention; it is the act
performed in saying something. “Saying something will often, or even normally,
produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the
audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons…. We shall call the performance of
an act of this kind the performance of a perlocutionary act or perlocution” (Austin,
1962: 101). A perlocutionary act is the act performed by or resulting from saying
something; it is the consequence of, or the change brought about by the utterance;
it is the act performed by saying something.

2.1.2 Searle’s theory

J. Searle (1969) improved the speech act theory by introducing indirect speech act
theory. The notion of indirect speech act can be best illustrated by the classical
sample spoken at the standard dinner table: Can you pass the salt? It can be
interpreted as a direct speech act of asking the hearer whether he has the ability of
passing the salt or not, or an indirect speech act of requesting the hearer to pass the
salt. Thus the speaker is performing a primary illocutionary act of request by way
of performing a secondary illocutionary act of asking a question. He argues that,
where a certain force is part of the meaning, where the meaning uniquely
determines a particular force, these are not two different acts but two different
labels for the same act, and he reached the conclusion that there are only
illocutionary acts. Searle holds that (1) the basic linguistic unit is not a sign, but a
speech act; (2) speech acts are controlled by two types of rules: regulative rules
(dynamic rules for performing illocutionary acts in communication) and
constitutive rules (basic rules recognized as for performing utterance and
prepositional acts). Searle classified illocutionary speech acts into the following
five types:

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(1) Representatives: speech acts stating or describing, saying what the speaker
believes to be true. For example, “I have never seen the man before.” “The earth is
globe.” Using a representative, the speaker makes words fit his belief.
(2) Directives: speech acts trying to get the hearer to do something. For
example, “Open the window!” “Would you like to go to the picnic with us?”
Directives express what the speaker wants. Using a directive, the speaker makes
the world fit the words. Commands, orders, requests, suggestions and demands etc.
fall into this group.
(3) Commissives: speech acts committing the speaker himself to some future
course of action. For example, “I promise to come.” “I will bring you the book
tomorrow without fail.” Commissives express what the speaker intends. Using a
commissive, the speaker undertakes to make the world fit the words. Promises,
commits, offers and refusals all belong to this category.
(4) Expressives: speech acts expressing feelings or attitude towards an
existing state. For example, “I’m sorry for the mess I have made.” “It’s really kind
of you to have thought of me.” They express the speaker’s psychological state and
are often statements of joy, sorrow, likes, dislikes, pleasure and pain. Using an
expressive, the speak makes words fits the world or feeling.
(5) Declaratives: speech acts bringing about immediate changes by saying
something. For example, “I now declare the meeting open.” “I fire you.” Using a
declaration, the speaker changes the world by his utterances.

2.2 The Speech Act of Request

As stated above, Searle placed requests into the category of directives, together
with commands, orders, suggestions and demands etc. They share the
characteristics of getting the hearer to do something. However, requests are

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different from the other elements in this group. For example, the crucial difference
between commands and requests is that a command has the feature of
“unconditional” whereas a request is conditional. That is, for a command, the
speaker assumes that the hearer will comply. But for a request, the directive of the
speaker will take effect only if the hearer agrees. In other words, the hearer can
refuse a request but cannot refuse a command and thus, to make a request, the
speaker needs to use a polite way so that the hearer will not refuse it. This part will
introduce some basic notions about request, including the structure of request,
three levels of request strategies, and request perspectives.

2.2.1 Structure of request

According to Blum-Kulka (1989), the request sequence may include three
segments: alerters, supportive moves, and head acts. For example:
Judith, I missed class yesterday, do you think I could borrow your notes? I promise

to return them by tomorrow.

As this example illustrates, the request sequence may include: alerters, such as
address terms (‘Judith’), preposed supportive moves (‘I missed class yesterday’),
the request proper, or Head Act (‘could I borrow your notes?’), optionally
elaborated with downgraders (‘do you think’) or upgraders and postposed
supportives moves (‘I promise to return them by tomorrow’).
Alerters. When preceding requests, alerters serve as attention-getters, and
hence are equal in function to all verbal means used for this purpose. It includes
title/role (‘Dr.’, ‘Professor’), surname (‘Thomas’), first name (‘Edward’),
nickname (‘Ed’), endearment term (‘dear’, ‘darling’), pronoun (‘you’),
attention-getter (‘hey’, ‘excuse me’, ‘listen’) and a combination of the above.
Supportive moves. Requests are often preceded by checks on availability

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(‘Are you busy?’) and attempts to get a precommitment (‘Will you do me a

favor?’). They may also be preceded, or followed, by grounders, which provide the
reason for the request (‘I missed class yesterday, could I…’) or by promises and
threats, all of which serve to persuade the hearer to do x. Some supportive moves,
like grounders, can serve as requests by themselves (‘I must have left my pen
somewhere’ responded by ‘here, take mine’).
Head acts. (the request proper): The Head Act is that part of the sequence
which might serve to realize the act independently of other elements. Head Acts
can vary on two dimensions: (a) strategy type, and (b) perspective.

2.2.2 Three levels of request strategies

Brown & Levinson maintain that the speech act of request is intrinsically
face-threatening to the hearer, which we will analyze in the following sections.
Leech also related that the speech act of request competes with politeness and is
impolite in essence. By making a request, the speaker asks the recipient to do as
the speaker wants and thus infringes on the freedom of the hearer. “The requestee
may feel that the request is an intrusion on his or her freedom of action or even a
power play. As for the requester, he/she may hesitate to make requests for fear of
exposing a need or out of fear of possibly making the requestee lose
face.( Blum-Kulka, 1989: 11)” Therefore, the requester needs to use some
strategies to lessen or minimize the imposition of request on the recipient.
According to Searle (1976), a request can be more or less direct, i.e., the
illocutionary act can be more or less apparent from the locutionary act. The more
direct the request is, the more abrupt and more face-threatening it is. Blum-Kulka
& House (1989) divided request strategies into three major categories by the level
of directness.

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1. Direct strategies: marked explicitly as requests, i.e., the illocutionary act of

request can be directly recognized from the locutionary act.
Clean up that mess.
You’ll have to move that car.
2. Conventionally indirect strategies: strategies for requesting by contextual
preconditions as conventionalized in a language.
How about cleaning up?
Could you clean up the kitchen, please?
3. Non-conventionally indirect strategies: hints, i.e., the requests are referred to
by some contextual clues.
You have left the kitchen in a right mess.
I am a nun. (in response to a persistent hasslar)

2.2.3 Request perspectives

Choice of perspective presents another classification of requests. According to
Blum-Kulka & Alshtain (1989), four perspectives are included in requests:
Speaker-oriented: requests emphasizing the role of the agent
Can I have it?
Hearer-oriented: requests focusing on the role of the recipient
Can you do it?
Inclusive: requests including both the agent and the recipient
Can we start cleaning now?
Impersonal: neither the agent nor the recipient is mentioned in the request
It needs to be cleaned.
Choice of perspective affects social meaning; since requests are inherently
imposing, avoidance to name the hearer as actor can reduce the form’s level of

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coerciveness, and the speaker-oriented request implies that the recipient have
control over the speaker. Therefore, the speaker-oriented request is considered the
most polite and the hearer-oriented the least.

2.3 Politeness Theories

Before we come to politeness theories, Grice’s Cooperative Principle (CP)
inevitably needs to be mentioned. In 1975, Grice explained his CP which suggests
four maxims conducting our conversation:
(1) Quantity Maxim:
(a) Make your contribution as informative as required (for the current
purposes of the exchange).
(b) Do not make your contribution more informative as required.
(2) Quality Maxim: try to make your contribution one that is true.
(a) Do not say what you believe that is false.
(b) Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
(3) Relation Maxim: be relevant.
(4) Manner Maxim: be perspicuous.
(a) Avoid obscurity of expression.
(b) Avoid ambiguity.
(c) Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).
(d) Be orderly.
However, in our daily life, we often break these maxims in our conversation.
Leech (1983: 80) gave us two examples:
(1) A: We will miss Bill and Agatha, won’t we?
B: Well, we will miss Bill.

(2) Parent: Someone’s eaten the icing off the cake.

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Child: It wasn’t ME.

In the first conversation, B’s complete answer should be “We will miss Bill but
not Agatha” and thus he breaks the quantity maxim. The second conversation also

breaks the quantity maxim because the parent uses “someone” although he/she
knows who ate the icing. What accounts for those is the consideration of
politeness. B did not offend Agatha in the first conversation and the parent did not
scold the child directly in the second conversation. As CP is not enough to explain
daily conversation, many scholars presented their politeness theories.

2.3.1 Leech’s Politeness Principles

Leech (1983) introduced the Politeness Principles (PP) in addition to Grice’s CP
together with a number of maxims: Tact maxim, Generosity maxim, Approbation
maxim, Modesty maxim, Agreement maxim, and Sympathy maxim (1983: 16,
132).
1) Tact maxim (in impositives and commissives)
(a) Minimize cost to other
(b) Maximize benefit to other
2) Generosity maxim (in impositives and commissives)
(a) Minimize benefit to self
(b) Maximize cost to self
3) Approbation maxim (in expressives and assertives)
(a) Minimize dispraise of other
(b) Maximize praise of other
4) Modesty maxim (in expressives and assertives)
(a) Minimize praise of self
(b) Maximize dispraise of self

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5) Agreement maxim (in assertives)

(a) Minimize disagreement between self and other
(b) Maximize agreement between self and other
6) Sympathy maxim (in assertives)
(a) Minimize antipathy between self and other
(b) Maximize sympathy between self and other
Leech’s politeness principles explained why some utterances are more polite than
others and provided us with the instructions on how to be polite. Among the six
maxims, the Tact Maxim and the Generosity Maxim are the two most important
ones as they are used in impositives and commissives which acquire politeness
and reflect politeness most. The Tact Maxim takes the consideration of the hearer
while the Generosity Maxim the speaker. As a speech act involves the hearer and
the speaker at the same time, the cost to self increases with the benefit to other and
the cost to other with the benefit to self. Therefore, the Tact Maxim almost shares
the same meaning with the Generosity Maxim.

2.3.2 B&L’s face-saving theory

According to Brown and Levinson (1978), politeness means the rational actions
taken by Model Person (MP) to preserve the face of the interlocutors, especially
the hearer. Thus, Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory is also called
face-saving theory.
What is face? Goffman (1967) defined face as “the public self-image that
every member wants to claim for himself”. Brown and Levinson derived the
concept of face from Goffman and divided an individual’s face into two parts:
positive face and negative face. The positive face is every member’s desire of to
be agreed or liked by others. The negative face is every member’s desire that

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

others will not impose on himself and his action will not be interfered or blocked
by others, i.e., the freedom of his action.
B&L maintain that many speech acts are intrinsically face-threatening acts
(FTA), so how to avoid or minimize it will employ certain politeness strategies.
They proposed four types of FTAs:
1) Acts threatening to the hearer’s negative face, telling him what to do and
what not to do, such as ordering, advising, threatening, requesting,
warning, etc.
2) Acts threatening to the hearer’s positive face, ignoring the addressee’s
feeling or disapproving what the hearer believes, such as disagreeing,
denying, criticizing, complaining, refusing, retorting, challenging, raising
taboo topics, etc.
3) Acts threatening the addresser’s negative face, such as accepting offers or
thanks, expressing thanks, promising unwillingly, etc.
4) Acts threatening the addresser’s positive face, such as apologizing,
accepting compliments, self-contradicting, confessing, admitting a mistake,
etc.
According to B & L, the degree of seriousness of FTAs is determinded by
three variables:
1) Social distance (D) between the speaker and the hearer, in fact, the
degree of familiarity and solidarity they share.
2) Relative power (P) of the speaker with respect to the hearer, in fact, the
degree to which the speaker can impose on the hearer.
3) Absolute ranking (R) of imposition in the culture, both in terms of
expenditure of goods or services by the hearer, the right of the speaker

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

to perform the act, and the degree to which the hearer welcomes the
imposition. (1987: 74)
Thus, Wx (the weight of seriousness of the FTA) can be calculated by the formula:
Wx ＝ D (S,H) ＋ P (H,S) ＋ Rx
The degree of Wx determined by the three variables can hence determine the
degree of politeness that is required.
B & L presented five redressive strategies of politeness for doing FTAs:

1. Without redressive action, baldly

On record 2. Positive politeness
Do the FTA With redressive action
4. Off record 3. Negative politeness

5. Don’t do the FTA

Possible strategies for doing FTAs

(Brown & Levinson, 1987: 69)

2.3.3 Non-universality of Leech and B&L’s politeness theories

Brown and Levinson, as well as Leech, think that their theories can be applied
universally, which incurred a lot of criticism from scholars in the world. Principle
of politeness and face-saving theory were thus challenged by other cultures. In
China, face theory was revisited and renewed by L. R. Mao. Mao (1994) divides
Chinese face into “mianzi” and “lian”. The former stands for prestige or reputation,
which is either achieved through getting on in life, or ascribed by other members
of one’s own community, while the latter refers to “the respect of the group for a
man with a good moral reputation”. B&L centers the concept of face upon the
individual rather than the communal aspect of face, i.e., face is a self-image,

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whereas Chinese face emphasizes the harmony of individual conduct with the
views and the judgment of the community.
Professor Gu Yueguo (1990) investigated Chinese politeness manifested in
actual interaction. According to Gu, Chinese politeness is characterized by a
tendency to degenerate oneself and respect others. He claimed that Leech and B &
L’s theories are unsuitable for Chinese data and demonstrated five maxims of
politeness in Chinese:
(1) The self-denigration maxim. The maxim consists of two clauses or
sub-maxims:
a. denigrate self
b. elevate others.
This maxim absorbs the notion of respectfulness and modesty.
(2) The addressing term maxim: address your interlocutor with a proper
addressing term. This maxim is based on the notion of respectfulness and
attitudinal warmth.
(3) The refinement maxim: the maxim refers to self’s behavior to others,
which meets certain standards. With regard to language use, it means the
use of refined language and a ban on foul language. The use of
euphemisms and indirectness is also covered.
(4) The agreement maxim: The maxim refers to efforts made by both
interlocutors to maximize agreement and harmony and minimize
disagreement.
(5) The virtue-word-deed maxim: The maxim refers to minimizing cost and
maximizing benefit to others at the motivational level, and maximizing
benefit received and minimizing cost to self at the conversational level.

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

(Gu, 1992)
Based on the previous researches made by Chinese scholars, this thesis insists that
the politeness theories of Leech and B&L are not proper for Chinese culture in the
following aspects and tries to provide evidences through a culturally contrastive
study of the speech act of request in English and Chinese.
1) The connotation of face. As we mentioned above, B & L adopted
Goffeman’s definition of “face” and regarded face as the “public self
image”, but Chinese face emphasizes “public face” which does not yield to
individual’s will but brings individual conduct into the harmony with the
views and the judgment of the community.
2) The content of face. B&L’s face-saving theory divides face into positive
face and negative face and claims that all the speech acts are
face-threatening to the speaker or the hearer. In Occidental cultures, the
speech act of request, even including an invitation, is threatening to the
hearer’s negative face as the hearer is disturbed by an invitation and thus
people need to make an appointment before every invitation. But in
Chinese culture, everyone is polite to others when he makes an invitation,
and people even need to refuse the invitation many times before their
accepting, which is also threatening to the speaker’s negative face
according to B&L. Therefore, negative face is improper in Chinese culture.
In English, when the interlocutor makes a request, he/she needs to be
indirect to mitigate the imposition of the act so as to protect the recipient’s
negative face. In Chinese, requests should be contained in long reasons to
save both interlocutors, especially speaker’s positive face.
3) Factors affecting politeness. By B&L’s face-saving theory, requests are

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

intrinsically threatening to the hearer’s negative face, and the seriousness

of the FTA is determined by the social distance, relative power and
absolute ranking, which in turn determine the degree of required politeness.
But in Chinese, when a young man makes a request, he uses a much more
polite way than an old man. Age and sex are also the affecting factors for
politeness in making requests.
4) Politeness Maxims. Leech’s maxims are criticized by many Chinese
scholars. As we discussed in the above, Gu criticized Leech’s maxims and
put his own maxims. Xu Shenghuan (1992) also criticized the extremity of
Leech’s maxims and put his moderate theories. Among Leech’s six
maxims, Tact Maxim is most closely related to requests. According to
Leech’s Tact Maxim, the interlocutor needs to minimize the cost to other
and maximize the benefit to other. That is true in Chinese when the
speaker is in a lower position than the hearer. But when the boss speaks to
his employee “ 请 你 把 门 关 上 好 吗 ？ ” in Chinese, maybe he is
absolutely angry instead of polite although it is quite polite to say “Would
you please close the door?” in English. As a result, appropriateness
overweighs cost and benefit for politeness in Chinese, depending on the
status of the interlocutors, the action itself, etc.
5) The essence of politeness for requests. According to Leech’s Politeness
Principles, it seems that benefiting other and costing self is the essence of
politeness for requests. Unlike native English speakers, Chinese people try
to be polite by acting properly according to one’s own social position and
obeying Chinese moralities such as being hospitable and warm, kind and
friendly, frank etc.

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Chapter 3 Research Design and Result Analysis

3.1 Research Design
As the title indicates, this thesis aims at a comparison of the speech act of request
between English and Chinese. We will adopt Blum-Kulka’s DCT and choose some
students in Harbin Institute of Technology to do the research.

3.1.1 Subjects
In this research, altogether 60 students in Harbin Institute of Technology were
chosen to fill in the questionnaire, all majoring in science or technology, including
undergraduates and graduate students. There are two reasons for such a choice.
First, as those students are smart and hard-working, they can do the job well and
be responsible for it. The other reason is that they are different from art-major
students, who are somewhat nervous about language, which may influence the
answers.

3.1.2 Instrument
Blum-Kulka used the Discourse-Completion Test (DCT) in CCSARP in 1989. The
test consists of scripted dialogues that represent socially differentiated situations.
Each dialogue is preceded by a short description of the situation, specifying the
setting, and the social distance between the participants and their status relative to
each other, followed by incomplete dialogue. Respondents were asked to complete
the dialogue there by providing the speech act aimed at, for example
At the University
Ann missed a lecture yesterday and would like to borrow Judith’s notes.
Ann: _______________________________________________________
Judith: Sure, but let me have them back before the lecture next week.

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

The DCT has great advantages and has enjoyed unparalleled popularity in
cross-cultural research. But it still has disadvantages: the respondents may be
influenced by the context and can not fill the blank naturally. Thus this research
adapts the DCT into an open-ended questionnaire in which just the situation is
provided and the respondents can fill in the blanks more freely. We adopt all the
eight situations of request designed by Blum-Kulka in CCSARP in 1989:
1. A student asks his roommate to clean up the kitchen the latter had left in a mess
the night before.
2. A young woman wants to get rid of a man pestering her on the street.
3. A student asks another student to lend her some lecture notes.
4. A student asks people living on the same street for a ride home.
5. An applicant calls for information on a job advertised in a paper.
6. A policeman asks a driver to move her car.
7. A student asks a teacher for an extension on a seminar paper.
8. A university professor asks a student to give his lecture a week earlier than
scheduled.

3.2 Result Analysis

Based on the previous achievements of some scholars and the result we collected
in this research, we will make a comparison of request between English and
Chinese in the following. This comparison includes five parts: syntactic
comparison, semantic comparison, strategic comparison, affecting factors, and
request responses.

3.2.1 Syntactic Comparison

It is known that three are three commonly used instructions or moods at the

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sentential level in most of the world languages: declaratives (talking about

something objectively in the world in the form of a statement.), imperatives
(directing somebody to do something in the form of a command.) and
interrogatives (asking somebody for something in the form of a question.).
According to Sifianou (1992: 125-157), requests can be performed with a
variety of constructions, such as imperatives, interrogatives, negatives,
declaratives, and elliptical structures. In this thesis, we will discuss imperatives,
interrogatives and declaratives as those three forms are the most frequent forms
and only those three forms are involved in our survey.
1．Imperatives
Imperatives usually only contain a verb and an object or some complements,
without a subject unless for special reasons like emphasis. In English, direct
imperatives are usually considered impolite and hence inappropriate for making
requests. For example:
Lend me your notebook.
Such an imperative may be defined as a command when the speaker is in a higher
social status than the hearer. It places much imposition on the hearer and may
cause offense as a request. Therefore, people often use interrogatives for making
such a request:
Would you lend me your notebook?
Many Western scholars admit that imperatives are the least polite constructions
compared with declaratives and interrogatives. Leech (1983: 119) holds that “an
imperative impositive is tactless in that it risks disobedience, which is a fairly
grave type of conflict situation.” Brown and Levinson (1987) also state that
imperatives are one of the most intrinsically face-threatening acts which seem

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

brusque and discourteous.

On the contrary, requests like “借我用用你的车” are quite acceptable in
Chinese. In Chinese, imperatives are far more often used among in-groups, such as
family members, close friends, but much less among strangers (张绍杰，王晓彤：
1997). In English, even family members use interrogatives instead of imperatives
to mitigate the threatening to the addressee’s face. For example, when the wife
asks the husband to pass her the salt, she will not say “Pass me the salt.” but “Can
you pass me the salt?” instead. But in Chinese, the wife will speak to the husband
directly:
把盐递给我。
In our survey, imperatives can be found in many situations:
请你把厨房打扫一下。(Situation 1)
笔记借我用一下。(Situation 3)
顺路载我一程吧。(Situation 4)
请移动一下地方。(Situation 6)
请做好准备。(Situation 8)
In Chinese, speakers often use imperatives for requests if it is convenient. It is
troublesome for Chinese to use other forms of requests and any other form
increases the distance between the interlocutors. Therefore, family members, close
friends and even acquaintances often use imperatives in making requests.
2．Interrogatives
In English, interrogatives, which range from simple to elaborate constructions, are
the most frequent form for making requests. According to Levinson, the request
proposition “Close the door” can be expressed in nineteen different ways in
English as the following (Levinson, 1983: 264-265):

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a. I want you to close the door.

I’d be much obliged if you’d close the door.
b. Can you close the door?
Are you able by any chance to close the door?
c. Would you close the door?
Won’t you close the door?
d. Would you mind closing the door?
Would you be willing to close the door?
e. You ought to close the door.
It might help to close the door.
Hadn’t you better close the door?
f. May I ask you to close the door?
Would you mind awfully if I was to ask you to close the door?
I am sorry to have to tell you to please close the door.
g. Did you forget the door?
Do us a favor with the door, love.
How about a bit less breeze?
Now Johnny, what do big people do when they come in?
OK, Johnny, what am I going to say next?
Among the above nineteen ways, thirteen are interrogatives. Obviously,
interrogatives are more polite than imperatives and declaratives. Among the
interrogatives themselves, the ones in e, f, and g are more polite in b, c, and d and
can hardly find equivalents in Chinese. In b, c, and d, the interrogatives inquiring
about the hearer’s ability is more polite than those about the hearer’s willingness,
and the ones with past tense are more polite than those with present tense.

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

In Chinese, the formulated form for request interrogatives are “...怎么样？”

“…好吗？”“…吗？”“…好不好？”“...行不行？”. We can find relevant
expressions inquiring about the hearer’s ability:
帮我把厨房的卫生打扫一下好吗？
能帮我把厨房的卫生打扫一下吗？
你能否把课堂笔记借给我抄写一遍？
Apparently there are more expressions of interrogatives for making request in
English than in Chinese and some elaborately constructed English interrogatives
do not have equivalents in Chinese. For example, the sentence in f “Would you
mind awfully if I was to ask you to close the door?” can never be used in Chinese
as “如果我请你把门关上，你不会特别介意吧？” because it is abnormal in
daily conversation.
In short, there are more imperatives and fewer interrogatives in Chinese than
in English. Such difference may first result from the syntactical structure of
imperatives in English. In English, different from interrogatives and declaratives,
imperatives do not share the changes of tense, number, or voice in the predicates,
which makes themselves more direct and abrupt than in Chinese so that fewer
imperatives are used in English. But English modals have different forms and
functions than Chinese models. The English modals have varieties: present tense
and past tense and the past tense forms are even more polite for making request.
But in Chinese, modals have no changes at all. The English modals express the
speakers’ attitude of hesitation and mitigate the imposition and face threatening to
the addressee, which makes the requests more polite than imperatives. Though the
modal “can” has the Chinese equivalent “能够” and “will” “愿意”, the Chinese
modals make the request impolite. For example, if we say “你愿意把笔记借给我

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

看一下吗？” instead of “把笔记借给我看一下好吗？”, it is not readable and

quite inappropriate between familiars.
Such difference also has roots in English and Chinese culture. In English,
people should show respect to everyone’s freedom and accordingly they avoid
imperatives to save the negative face of others. They use interrogatives to mitigate
the imposition of the request and minimize the cost of the other to achieve
politeness. But in Chinese, friendliness is admired by most people who are not in
distant relationship. In a family, all the members are in very close relation and
courtesy are unnecessary in daily communication. For many Chinese people,
especially those who come from far away and gather together, the whole country is
often considered as a big family and all the people consider friends as brothers.
Therefore, people use imperatives for requests to show closeness with each other.
As all the people accept the idea that everyone has the obligation to help others
and hope all the others will offer help, imperatives are considered as a sign of
friendliness rather than impoliteness.
3．Declaratives
Declaratives can be divided into two types: hints and need statements. Brown &
Levinson placed hints into the category of “off-record strategy”. The declarative of
hints is a very polite form for performing the function of requesting as it is indirect
and the hearer needs effort to understand the speaker’s actual intention by the
surface structure of the declarative. For example:
It is cold here.
The hearer needs to understand that the speaker wants him/her to close the window.
It is so ambiguous that in Chinese people usually avoid such forms of requesting
because it often leads to misunderstanding and the failure of communication.

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

Need statements are very direct as the speaker’s intention is explicitly

expressed. Both in English and in Chinese, people often use need statements to
perform their requests. For example:
I’d like you to close the door, Mark.
我想咨询一下详细情况。(Situation 5)
The important difference in need statements is that we often use “想”“要” to
relate need statements in Chinese whereas in English the verbs “need” or “want”
are usually avoided because they are too direct to be polite. In English, people use
the conventionalized way of “I’d like…” to state a desire.
Such difference also originates from the two cultures. In English, requests of
hints are considered polite in that they leave options open to the hearer to interpret
them in the way they wish to, and they use “I’d like you…” instead of “I need
you…” or “I want you…” so as to mitigate the imposition on the recipient of the
request. That is, as we discussed above, native English speakers often save the
negative face of the hearers. But in Chinese, frankness is highly admired. Hints
may lead to misunderstanding among strangers and distance among close friends
or relatives. Consequently, people use need statements with “想” or “要” much
more frequently than hints.

3.2.2 Semantic Comparison

Semantically, we need exam the similarities and differences of the meaning and
usage in every part of requests. In this part, we will mainly discuss the alerters, the
supportive moves and the sequence of supportive moves and head acts. The head
acts will be discussed when we come to request strategies.
1．Alerters
Zhang Shaojie and Wang Xiaotong (1997) claim that the basic structure of

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requests exists universally in various languages and Chinese culture is vividly

reflected in the use of alerters in Chinese requests. Alerters of requests are mainly
the address forms which get the hearers’ attentions. As address forms are
culturally-rooted, appropriate address forms do not only draw the hearers’
attentions, but also establish or maintain proper social relations between
interlocutors. Gu Yueguo (1990) analyzed Chinese politeness systems and set up
six politeness maxims, in which the addressing term maxim is an essential
component. According to Gu, modern politeness system originates from ancient
“Li” in Chinese and social status and distance, age, sex, situation, etc. should all
be taken into account in addressing forms to achieve politeness. In Chinese, the
addressing forms include official titles, professional titles, occupational titles,
politeness markers, nertuers, intimacy markers, names, and kinship terms, etc.
while native English speakers address people by their first names or the pattern
“Mr./Miss/Mrs./Mz + last name” or use zero addressing terms (Jia Yuxin, 1997:
334-340).
In our survey, the author collected some culturally-based addressing terms
such as 先生，同学，同志，老师，小李，老叔，叔叔，师傅 etc. In Situation 3,
over 30% students use “同学” for the request:
同学，你好！我的笔记没记全，能借你的看看吗？
同学，可以借你的笔记看看吗？
同学，笔记借我用一下。
Such an addressing form “同学” , whose English equivalent is “classmate”, can
never be found in English. Chinese people are used to addressing people by their
professional title to show respect to others and keep proper relationship with them.
Such a term “同学” indicates that the addresser is not familiar with the addressee

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

enough but they are classmates since they are having class together. The addresser
use the term to show that they are in a close relation as classmates but not close
enough as familiars on the one hand and the addressee’s profession is a student on
the other. Similarly, in Situation 7, almost 100% of the students use “老师” for the
request:
老师，您布置的论文作业我还没有完成，我可不可以迟一些上交？
老师，我的论文还有些问题，我可以延迟一下吗？
Such a professional title shows the addresser’s respect to the addressee and their
relation is teacher and student, but in English, “teacher” can never be used for
addressing people in any situation.
Another phenomenon of alerters is the use of kinship terms. In Situation 4,
some students use “叔叔” or “老叔” to address the driver:
老叔，您开车回家吧？我也回家……
叔叔，我搭一下车行吗？
嗨！叔叔/阿姨，我急着回去有事，能不能带我一下？
Actually, such kinship terms are frequently used in Chinese requests as well as
other speech acts. Different kinship terms are used depending on the age of the
addressee:
大爷，麻烦您帮我看一下包行吗？
阿姨，帮忙给我找一下二楼的张永好吗？
大哥，请问去儿童医院怎么走？
Chinese people often employ kinship terms to non-kins to shorten the distance
between the interlocutors. In China, family, which is fairly common and popular,
is often considered as a warm group so that kinship terms are indicators of warmth
and hospitality. People use them on various occasions to show closeness to the

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

addressees. People also use “小/老” plus surname in addressing to show friendship
and closeness, for example
小李，可以把上午的课堂笔记借给我看看吗？
In Situation 6, mainly three addressing forms are used: “先生”, “同志”，and
“师傅”:
先生，您的车停在了非安全地带，请您移动一下。
同志，您现在停靠在非安全地带，希望立刻移动到安全地带。
师傅，请您把车停到安全地带，此处不安全。
The Chinese addressing term “先生”, whose English equivalent is Mr., are not so
frequently used as Mr. in English. In English, Mr. is a common term to refer to any
man. Chinese “先生” are only used in public places referring to an unfamiliar man.
It is a form of addressing showing the addresser’s politeness to the addressee.
Similarly, “同志” and “师傅” are also preferred addressing forms for strangers,
and these two terms are lexically vacant in English. “同志” is an unmarked term
(Scotton and Zhu, 1983: 486), or a neutral form of address to strangers in spit of
the addressee’s age, sex, occupation, etc. “师傅” is often limited to men and
conveys the addresser’s deference and cordiality to the addressee. All the three
addressing forms stand for quite formal politeness as the interlocutors are not
familiar.
It can be concluded that Chinese people use formal addressing forms when the
interlocutors are unfamiliar or their social positions are somewhat distant. Respect
is shown to the addressee through the addressing and hence politeness is achieved.
Informally, people often use some kinship terms or “小/老” plus surname in
addressing which varies depending on the age of the addressee and also the
addresser. Respect, love, kindness, and closeness are all contained in such

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

addressing forms which are consequently considered polite by the addressee.

These provide more evidence for the fact that Chinese pay more attention to their
own social positions. They choose different addressing terms for different people
according to their relation with the addressee in which the relative age also counts.
2. Supportive move and head act
According to Blum-Kulka (1989), supportive moves include checking on
availability (‘Are you busy?’), getting a precommitment (‘Will you do me a
favor?’), grounders for reasons (‘I missed class yesterday, could I…’), promises
and threats, etc. In our survey, such supportive moves can be found in Chinese:
有时间吗？等会把厨房打扫一下吧？
同学你好，我能借你的笔记看一看吗，使完后会马上还给你的。
In these two examples, “有时间吗？”, the supportive move of the first sentence,
checks the availability of the addressee of the first sentence, and “使完后会马上
还给你的”, a promise of the addresser, constitutes the supportive move of the
second sentence. But in the data collected in our survey, it is found that 90% of the
supportive moves tell the reasons of the requests:
同学，你好！我笔记没记全，能借你的看看吗？
同志，您现在停靠在非安全地带，希望立刻移动到安全地带。
老师，论文有点问题不能按时上交，老师能给我几天时间吗？
Certainly, sometimes different types of supportive moves can be joined in one
request to make the request more persuasive:
麻烦您，我有点急事，您要是也回家，能带我一程吗？
In this example, “我有点急事” tells the reason of the request for a ride, and “您要
是也回家” checks the availability of the addressee to minimize the cost of the
addressee.

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A striking feature of Chinese supportive moves is that the more difficult the
request is, the more frequent the supportive move appears. The frequency of
supportive move in Situation 1, 3, and 7 is like the following:
Table 3.1 Frequency of Supportive Move in Situation 1, 3, and 7

Situation 1 Situation 3 Situation 7

Frequency of 38.1% 47.6% 90.5%
supportive move
Clearly, among the three requests, the request in Situation 1 is the easiest as the
interlocutors are roommates and the requested act is cleaning the house. Over 60%
students did not use supportive moves at all in the survey but use the head acts
directly. The request in Situation 3 is more difficult than that in Situation 1, and
more supportive moves appear in the speech act. For Situation 7, the most difficult
one among the three, over 90% requests contain a supportive move in the
sentence.
Another distinctive feature of Chinese request is the sequence of the
supportive moves and the head act. As we can see in all the requests we collected,
all the supportive moves are placed before the head acts. In English, on the
contrary, people usually present the head act first. In the beginning of this thesis,
we introduced a pragmatic failure for a request of a leave between a Chinese
employee and an American boss. That example comes from Kirkpatrick’s work
and presents the dialogue between a Chinese police constable (CPC) of the former
Royal Hong Kong police (as it was then called) and his senior expatriate (English)
officer (EO). The interaction took place in the office of the senior officer in a
Hong Kong police station. The constable wants to request a day’s compassionate
leave to take his sick mother into hospital.

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

CPC: Sir.
EO: Yes, what is it?
CPC: My mother is not very well sir.
EO: SO?
CPC: She has to go into hospital sir.
EO: Well, got on with it. What do you want?
CPC: On Thursday sir.
EO: Bloody hell man, what do you want?
(At this point, the police constable mumbled something like ‘Nothing
sir’ and left the office.)
(Scollon, R., Scollon, S. W., & Kirkpatrick, A., 2000: 8)
This communication breakdown comes from the information sequence for
making requests, which constitutes the main difference between English and
Chinese requests in discourse level. Chinese people often presents the reason first
and the request later while English people want others to ask first and explain later.
The EO would have preferred the interaction to have followed this sequence:
CPC: I’d like to request a day’s leave for Thursday this week please sir.
EO: Why?
CPC: Well, my mother has to go into hospital on that day and I’d like to
go with her to make sure that everything is all right.
(Scollon, R., Scollon, S. W., & Kirkpatrick, A., 2000: 8)
Based on the above, we can summarize another feature of Chinese requests:
Chinese people use more supportive moves to expound the necessity of the request.
Kirkpatrick (2000) made a survey of the information of requests in Chinese by
analyzing some letters written to the Radio Australia by Chinese student and an

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

English student. Here we can make an analysis by one of them.

Letter by the Chinese student (The original Chinese copy is in Appendices):
Respected Radio Australia producers,
I have been a loyal listener to Radio Australia’s English teaching
programmes and to “Songs You Like” for several years. I consider both
programes to be extremely well produced. Let me describe myself a little:
I am a middle school student, I am eighteen and my home is in XXX, a
small border city. The cultural life really isn’t too bad. Because I like
studying English, I therefore follow those programmes closely. But
because the Central Broadcasting Station’s English programmes are rather
abstruse, they are not really suitable for me and therefore I get all my
practice in listening comprehension and dialogue from Radio Australia’s
English programs. This practice has been of great benefit. As I progress,
step by step through the course, I am keenly aware that not having the
teaching materials presents several difficulties. Because of this, I have
taken time to write this letter to you, in the hope that I can obtain a set of
Radio Australia’s English program’s teaching materials. Please let me
know the cost of the materials.
In addition, I hope to obtain a Radio Australia calendar. Wishing
Radio Australia’s MSC programs more interesting.
Listener XX
(Scollon, R., Scollon, S. W., & Kirkpatrick, A., 2000: 81)
In this letter, the writer makes two requests: 1. hope can obtain one RA
English programme materials; 2. “in addition hope obtain RA calendar”. Before
the first request, the writer makes a salutation, introduces “Me and Radio

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

Australia”, praises RA, introduces “Me”, tells the reasons why RA is good for
“me” and explains why he makes the request (“because no teaching materials”).
The schema of this letter is: Salution → Facework → Reason for request →
Request. The request itself is not begun until the writer has taken 191 characters of
a letter of 303 characters in introducing herself and praising Radio Australia.
Nearly two thirds of the letter is written before the request begins. The main
request for teaching materials is preceded by the reason for the request following
the “BECAUSE - THEREFORE” pattern.
The native speakers of English use a totally different pattern to make a request.
The following is a letter written by a native speaker of English:
Letter by the English student:
Dear Radio Australia,
I would be very grateful if you would be kind enough to send me
teaching materials for your excellent English language teaching programs.
I am learning English from your programs but am finding it difficult
without the materials.
I would also be very grateful if you would be kind enough to send me
a Radio Australia calendar.
Yours Sincerely
XXX
The writer makes the same first request in the first sentence after the
salutation. A brief reason follows the request. The schema of the letter is:
Salutation → Request → Reason. The request is presented before the reason
following a “REQUEST - BECAUSE” pattern.
To put it differently, the request in the first letter was not made until long

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

supportive moves were presented first, while in the second letter, the head act was
followed by short explanation of the motivation.
In summary, the supportive moves play a very important role in Chinese
request and Chinese people tend to use as many supportive moves as possible for
every request and put them in the first place to account for the head act. Such a
tendency owes to the face and face-work of Chinese people. Different from
English speakers, Chinese people care more about the positive face of the
requestee as well as that of the requester himself/herself. Every Chinese loves
his/her own face. Making a request indicates that the requester is not capable
enough or not good enough in some other qualities, thus people tend to use as
many supportive moves as possible and put them in the first place to save his/her
own face by explaining why he has to make such a request. At the same time, as
requests are intrinsically face-threatening, requesters use supportive moves to
mitigate the imposition of the request and avoid harming the requestee’s face. The
more reasonable supportive moves the requester provides, the more respectful and
thus polite he/she is to the requestee.

3.2.3 Strategic Comparison

Based on the data of our research and CCSARP, we will make a comparison of the
use of basic request strategies between Chinese and English.
Table 3.2 Comparison of the Use of Basic Request Strategies

Between Chinese and English

Direct Conventionally Non-conventionally

indirect indirect
Chinese 42.5% 52.5% 5%
English 9.8% 82.4% 7.8%

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From the above, we can see that Chinese people use direct strategies more
frequently while native English speakers use conventionally indirect strategies
more frequently and neither of them often use non-conventionally indirect. This
suggests that Chinese people are more direct than native English speakers but they
still use conventionally indirect strategies quite often, and non-conventionally
indirect strategies are the least favored in both English and Chinese. As hints often
cause ambiguity and misunderstandings, neither Chinese people nor native English
speakers prefer non-conventionally indirect strategies. But Chinese people use
more direct strategies than native English speakers. Direct strategies and
conventionally indirect strategies complement each other in Chinese while in
English the former occupy only a small portion of the requests but the latter are
highly preferred by native English speakers. What causes such differences? The
main reason lies in the relationship between the interlocutors. The superior uses
direct strategies to the subsuperior because the former is in a higher social status
than the latter and direct strategies are appropriate according to their social
positions. Close friends or family members use direct strategies to show their
closeness or friendship. Yet conventionally indirect strategies are often employed
to lessen the imposition of the request and save the requestee’s face.
Blum-Kulka subdivided the direct strategies into five groups: mood derivable,
performative, hedged performatives, obligation statements, and want statements.
We will analyze them by examining all the sub-strategies one by one.
1. Mood derivable.
Mood derivable refers to utterances of imperatives for request in which the
grammatical mood of the verb signals illocutionary force, like “Leave me alone.”,
“Clean up that mess.”, etc. This type of requests seldom appears in English. For

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

example, if the interlocutor speaks “Clean up the mess.”, it should be an order

rather than a request and would be considered very impolite when used as a
request even though the speaker is in a high social status than the hearer. Such
sentences with a “please” would be acceptable: “Please clean up the mess.”.
Usually such requests are achieved by query preparatory, one of the two
conventionally indirect strategies in such forms:
Will you clean up the mess?
Would you clean up the mess?
Can you clean up the mess?
Could you clean up the mess?
Consequently, more conventionally indirect strategies are used in requests of
English.
But in Chinese, it is quite usual for the interlocutor to use direct requests.
Basic verbs like “借我”, “给我” are often used for direct requests. In the data the
author collected, many direct requests are collected:
把笔记借我用一下。
顺路载我一程吧。
请把车移动一下地方。
你赶紧收拾哦！
你提前一周去吧。
For requests of mood derivable, there are some ways to make the imperatives
more polite in Chinese. As “please” makes a mood derivable acceptable in English,
Chinese “请” are often used to make such requests more polite:
请把笔记借我用一下。
请把车停靠在安全地带。

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Sometimes, the lexical term “您” are also used to achieve politeness, for example:
请您把车停到指定位置。
请您尽快将车开到别的地方。
But “您” is just used between interlocutors with far social distance. In the data
collected, it is used in situation 5, 6, and 8. Nobody used it in situation 1 in which
the interlocutors are roommates.
The speaker also change the request from hearer-oriented into inclusive to
achieve politeness. In situation 1, some students used imperatives to make requests
which are quite acceptable:
请你把厨房打扫一下。
厨房实在看不过去了，你赶紧收拾哦！
Other students used inclusive requests which sound more polite:
厨房太乱了，有时间我们打扫一下。
咱们把厨房打扫一下吧。
我要上课去了，来不及打扫厨房，你有时间打扫一下吗？或者等到我
下课回来后一起收拾？
2. Performative
Performatives are the utterances in which the naming of the illocutionary force is
explicitly named. In English, the performative verbs “ask”, “let” are often used to
make direct requests. For example
I am asking you to clean up the mess.
In Chinese, although there are many performative verbs like “叫/让”, “要求/
请求/恳求/乞求/求求”, no performative requests were used in the data the author
collected. In Chinese, such performative sentences “我叫/让/要你去扫地” express
orders rather than requests, and the speaker is begging by “我求你带我一程”.

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

3. Hedged performatives
Hedged performatives are utterances in which the naming of the illocutionary
force is modified by hedging expressions. For example,
I would like to ask you to give your presentation a week earlier than
scheduled.
In English, hedged performatives are used to achieve politeness by mitigating the
obvious requests. In the example above, the request of “give” is softened by the
hedged performative “would like to ask” and becomes more acceptable to the
recipient. But in Chinese, few people used hedged performatives in the data
collected because they express the uncertainty of the speaker instead of being
more polite. For example,
我想请你帮个忙行吗？
Such a hedged performative shows that the speaker is more uncertain whether the
hearer is willing to help him/her.
4. Obligation statements
Obligation statements refer to utterances which state the obligation of the hearer to
carry out the act. For example,
You’ll have to move the car.
You should clean the room.
You have to turn your paper earlier.
In English, obligations statements are proper to be used by speakers who are in
higher social status than the speaker in making requests though somehow they are
part of ordering. However, nobody used such requests in the data the author
collected. The reason is that such requests place more imposition on the recipient
by the obligation stated and considered more impolite. For example:

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

你应该把车拖走。
你得把房间打扫了。
Besides, the Chinese obligation statements indicator “得” is more colloquial so
that no such statements appeared in the questionnaires the author collected.
5. Want statements
Want statements refer to utterances which state the speaker’s desire that the hearer
carries out the act. For example
I need your notes.
I really wish you’d stop bothering me.
Want statements are impolite in English for request like “I need your notes”, and
the second sentence above “I really wish you’d stop bothering me” expresses the
speaker’s impatience, therefore, such request is rare in English. However, need
statements are sometimes used in the data collected. For example:
我想咨询一下详细情况。
需要你提前一周做演讲。
我想把论文晚交几天，可以吗？
In the above examples, the first one happens in the fifth situation when an
applicant calls for information on a job advertised in a paper. One third of the
students used want statements for their requests in this situation. Some students
used the second example in Situation Eight when a university professor asks a
student to give his lecture a week earlier than scheduled. In both the first and
second examples, the speakers are in higher social status than the hearers, and in
the third example, where the speaker, the student, is in a lower social status than
the hearer, the professor, the speaker used a tag question “可以吗？” to make it
more polite.

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

The conventionally indirect strategies can be subdivided into two types:

suggestory formulae and query preparatory.
6. Suggestory formulae
Suggestory formulae refers to utterances which contain a suggestion to do x.
How about cleaning up?
Such a strategy is often used in English. By such a strategy, the speaker changes
the request into a suggestion. However, in Chinese, such strategy is seldom used.
In the data the author collected, only one suggestory formulae is found:
厨房挺乱的，要不咱俩打扫一下？
Such a request is polite as it changes request into a suggestion. More obviously, it
is different from English because it is inclusive in Chinese while it is impersonal
in English. This accounts for why such a strategy is more polite in Chinese than in
English.
7. Query preparatory
Query preparatory refers to utterances containing reference to preparatory
conditions (e.g., ability, willingness) as conventionalized in any specific language.
Could you clean up the kitchen, please?
Would you mind moving your car?
This is the most preferred request strategy in English. According to
Blum-Kulka(1989), query preparatory is used in 72% of the requests in English.
The following table shows the distribution of substrategies of conventional
indirectness ( Blum-Kulka, 1987: 50).
In this table, all the types except No. 5 belong to query preparatory. Thus, a
request of cleaning up the kitchen can be expressed in the following ways by
query preparatory:

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Table 3.3 The Distribution of Substrategies of Conventional Indirectness

1 2 3 would 4 5 how 6 why

can/could will/would you mind possibility about don’t you
% 66.5 17.7 10.5 2.3 1.3 1.0
Can you clean up the kitchen?
Could you clean up the kitchen?
Will you clean up the kitchen?
Would you clean up the kitchen?
Would you mind cleaning up the kitchen?
Is it possible for you to clean up the kitchen?
Why don’t you clean up the kitchen?
It is more polite to use past tense of the model verbs in the query preparatory of
request concerning the hearer’s ability or willingness. Chinese lacks such
functions, and some common English structures are untranslatable or improper for
making request in Chinese. For example
* 你介意把房间打扫一下吗？
* 你可能把房间打扫一下吗？
* 你为什么不把房间打扫一下呢？
In the above three examples, the first two are not readable at all, and the last
sentence indicates that the speaker is complaining the hearer instead of requesting.
In the data the author collected, such an indirect strategy is used in more than
half of the requests. But the forms are rather different from the English ones:
把笔记借我一下行吗？
请你把厨房打扫一下行吗？
论文能晚交几天吗？

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

你能提前一周进行演讲吗？
你能顺便捎我一程吗？
你能不能把笔记借给我看一下？
我能不能推迟两天交啊？
可以借你的笔记看看吗？
我可不可以迟一些上交？
请把车停到安全地方好吗？
借你的笔记看一下好么？
Such interrogative forms of request are more polite in Chinese to make requests as
the speaker asks for the permission of the hearer in the request. The forms mainly
include “……吗？”, “……行吗？”, “……好吗/么？”, “能不能……？”. In
Chinese, query preparatory of requests contains questions about the hearer’s
ability and the possibility of the act, but the willingness are not included in this
category. For example
* 你愿意把笔记借给我看一下吗？
As we have discussed before, such a request can not be accepted in Chinese
because the speaker seems hypocritical by asking about the hearer’s willingness
for a request. However, “Will/Would you……?” is one of the commonest
structures for request in English. Maybe this is the reason why conventionally
indirect strategy is less frequently used in Chinese than in English although it
constitutes more than half of Chinese request.
The non-conventionally indirect strategies can be subdivided into strong hints
and mild hints. Strong hints refer to utterances containing partial reference to
object or element needed for the implementation of the act.
You have left the kitchen in a right mess.

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

Mild hints refer to utterances that make no reference to the request proper (or any
of its elements) but are interpretable as requests by context.
I am a nun. (in response to a persistent hassler)
Though non-conventionally indirect strategies, including strong hints and mild
hints, are least used both in English (7.8%) and Chinese (5%), different reasons
lead to it in Chinese and English.
In English, people would be annoyed if the speaker uses too many hints before
coming to the topic. As we discussed above, native English speakers present their
request first and then explain their reasons. In Chinese, hints often lead to
ambiguity and thus people seldom use them. In some way people are obliged to
use hints because the hearer has power over the speaker. In the data the author
collected, half of the requests in Situation 2 use hints. In Situation 2, the woman is
surely weaker than the man, therefore, she is likely to use hints for her request of
getting rid of the man. When the speaker is not confident whether the hearer will
accept the request but really expect the accepting, he/she sometimes has to use
non-conventionally indirect strategies. Thus, non-conventionally indirect
strategies often happen from children to parents, students to teachers, soldiers to
officers, employees to employers, etc.

3.2.4 Affecting factors

Blum-Kulka’s research contains two situational variables: Dominance (social
power) and Social Distance (familiarity). The two items vary in the eight
situations as the following:
Request situations Social Distance Dominance
S1 Kitchen -SD x=y
S2 Street +SD x=y

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

S3 Notes -SD x=y

S4 Ride +SD x<y
S5 Information +SD x<y
S6 Policeman +SD x>y
S7 Extension -SD x<y
S8 Lecturer -SD x>y
Obviously these two items have great influences on the choices of request
strategies. Let’s make a comparison of Situation 5 and situation 6 first. In both
these two situations, the social distance is +SD, which means that the speaker is
unfamiliar with the hearer, but the hearer in S5 have power over the speaker while
the speaker in S6 over the hearer. The strategies used in these two situations are
presented in the following table:
Table 3.4 The Use of Strategies in Situation 5 and Situation 6

Direct strategy Indirect strategy

Conventionally Non-conventionally
indirect strategy indirect strategy
S5 44% 39% 17%
S6 78% 17% 5%
It is clear that the addressers in Situation 6 use more direct strategies and more
indirect strategies are used in Situation 5. The more powerful the speaker, the
more direct the request.
The influence of familiarity can be examined from the comparison of S1 and
S2. In both these situations, the speaker and the hearer have equal power and there
is no dominance between the interlocutors (x=y), but the interlocutors in Situation
1 are much more familiar than those in Situation 2. The distinction of the

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strategies between these two situations mainly lies on the social distance. The
strategies used in these two situations are shown in the following table:
Table 3.5 The Use of Strategies in Situation 1 and Situation 2

Direct strategy Indirect strategy

Conventionally Non-conventionally
indirect strategy indirect strategy
S1 52.6% 26.3% 21.1%
S2 5.3% 21.1% 73.6%
We can draw the conclusion from the above table that the more familiar the
interlocutors are, the more directly they make their requests.
Besides these two factors, there are still some other factors which influence
the choices of request strategies. The imposition of the act plays very important
role on the choices of request strategies. By the imposition of the act, we mean the
difficulty of the request. When we borrow five yuan from a friend, we use quite
different request strategy from that when we borrow 5,000 yuan from a friend
because the latter is more difficult and thus places much more imposition on the
recipient. Let’s compare the two dialogues:
Dialogue 1:
A：有两块钱吗？
B：给。
This dialogue happens between two roommates when they pay for the goods
they buy in a supermarket. When A paid for the goods at the counter, he found that
he was in short of a change of two yuan and he turned to his roommate and asked
for two yuan from his roommate. His roommate gave him two yuan without
hesitation. However, when they went back to the dormitory, they began another

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

conversation.
Dialogue 2:
B: 你银行还有多少钱？
A: 不多了，我花钱很快。
B: 现在还有多少？
A: 应当还有一万多吧!
B: 那你现在还需要多少够用？
A: 我也不知道，我花钱无数（没有限制）。
B: 我开学要交学费，可能差点，你能不能给我省点出来？
A: 你要多少？
B: 可能缺两三千吧！
A: 好，我尽量吧！
Dialogue 2 is quite different from dialogue 1. Before the requester made the
request, he asked three questions related to it, which are about the financial
situation of requestee. Those three questions are supportive moves, which make
the request more indirect and more polite. Finally, B stated his difficulty and made
a request by a conventionally indirect strategy. Such difference results from the
imposition of the act. The requester will adopt a more indirect strategy to mitigate
the impact of the imposition as the request becomes more difficult.
Sex is also a factor which affects the choice of the request strategy. In the data
we collected in the survey, Situation 1 happens between two roommates. We can
make a comparison of the request strategies chosen by ladies and gentlemen.
It is usually agreed that ladies tend to use more indirect and more polite
strategies in making requests. But in our survey, things are different. Among the
same sex, ladies prefer direct strategy better than gentlemen and both ladies and

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

Table 3.6 The Use of Strategies by Ladies and Gentlemen in Situation 1

Direct strategy Indirect strategy

Conventionally Non-conventionally
indirect strategy indirect strategy
Lady 75% 25% —
Gentleman 50% 25% 25%
gentlemen use direct more than indirect strategy. According to the research result
of Zhang Shaojie and Wang Xiaotong (1997), when the ladies make requests to
gentlemen, they tend to use conventionally indirect strategy more than gentlemen
who make requests to ladies. But in a family, the husband prefers to use
conventionally indirect strategy while making requests to the wife.
In Chinese, age is also an important factor for the choices of request strategies.
According to Zhang Shaojie and Wang Xiaotong, requests can be divided into
three situations by the variable of age: the same age, the older to the younger, and
the younger to the older. The younger the speaker is than the hearer, the more
frequently the conventionally indirect strategies are used, amounting to 79.3%.
And when the speaker is older than the hearer, direct strategies are often used.
Non-conventionally indirect strategies are seldom used in all the three situations.
Such a result is quite different from English. As we know, people tend to use
conventionally indirect strategy in English, no matter the speaker is older or
younger than the hearer.
3.2.5 Request response
Response is of vital importance as an integral part of request, but researchers pay
little attention to it. According to Hancher (1979), such speech acts would be
incomplete unless the hearer makes proper responses to them. In the DCT

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

designed by Blum-Kulka, the responses are given by the designer before the
testees fill in the blanks. From the given examples, we can see that the recipients
tend to give positive answers to the addresser with some requirements:
(a) At the University
Ann missed a lecture yesterday and would like to borrow Judith’s notes.
Ann:
_________________________________________________________
Judith: Sure, but let me have them back before the lecture next week.
(Blum-Kulka et. al, 1989: 14)
Even for apologies, the addressee would probably be forgiven with some warnings
or remedies:
(b) At the College teacher’s office
A student has borrowed a book from her teacher, which she promised to
return today. When meeting her teacher, however, she realizes that she
forgot to bring it along.
Teacher: Miriam, I hope you brought the book I lent you.
Miriam:
_______________________________________________________
Teacher: OK, but please remember it next week.
A common feature of these two examples can be drawn that the recipients offer the
addresser help or forgive his/her mistakes before some requirements. However, in
the questionnaires the author collected, over 50% Chinese addressees are ready to
provide offers to the request without any preconditions. For example
Situation 3:
女生：同学，可以把笔记借我一下吗？

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

同学：好，拿去。
Situation 4:
学生：可以让我搭段车吗？
开车者：可以，上来吧。
Chinese people are often ready to help others who are in need of help. Chinese
culture values the virtue of the generous offer of help to others. Even when it is
awkward for the requestee to help the requester, he/she would try to offer a hand.
Situation 4:
学生：您能带我回去么？
开车者：好的，不过我要先去接孩子，如果你不着急，就上车吧。
Such answers are quite common in many situations. Certainly, on some occasions
which are really necessary, the addressee will also tell the requester his
requirement after his/her promising:
Situation 3:
女生：同学，笔记借我用一下。
同学：好的，别忘了下课时还给我。
In this example, it can be inferred that the interlocutors are not roommates. Since
the reqestee needs to have the notebook herself after the class, he/she requires the
requester to return it back after class. But nothing can change his/her lending the
notebook to the requester as long as he/she doesn’t need it in class.
Tsui (2000) classifies the responses to a request into two categories: positive
responding act and negative responding act (including temporization). The
addressees don’t need to give a positive response when they are not able to offer
the help. Therefore, the addressee seems to need proper strategies to be polite in
the refusal. Beebe, et al. (1985) put, Americans usually employ three major

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

strategies which were found to be used in sequence at the beginning of a refusal.

These were (a) an expression of a positive opinion such as “I’d like to”, (b) an
expression of regret such as “I am sorry”, (c) an excuse, reason or explanation
such as “my children will be home that night” or “I have a headache”.
In our survey, only 2.5% of the answers were negative responses. But we can
still find some strategies in the refusal of a request. Most of them will refuse the
request with an expression of regret at the beginning of the answer:
Situation 4:
1. 学生：顺路带我一程吧。
开车者：不好意思，我现在不回家，去不了那个方向。
2. 学生：你要开车回家吗？如果回家顺路把我带回去吧？
开车者：不好意思啊，我还有其他事要办，晚点才能回去。
Both of the above two answers begin with an expression of regret “不好意思”.
The whole answer is composed of an expression of regret and an excuse, reason or
explanation for the denial of the refusal. The requestee doesn’t usually refuse the
requester directly.
In short, Chinese people are often ready to offer their help and try their best to
help the requester. When they are not able to meet the requester’s need, they would
apologize and explain their difficulties. This phenomenon can be explained by
Chinese face and face-work. Offering help to the requester means that the
requestee saves the requester’s positive face by agreeing with the requestee’s
desire. According to Chinese culture, the whole country is a big family and all the
people in the country are members in this big family. Everyone has the obligation
to help others and thus it is polite to be kind and warm to others.

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Chapter 4 Cultural Analysis

As we discussed above, different from native English speakers, Chinese people
care for the positive face of the interlocutors in harmony with the communities and
Chinese politeness is decided by the identity of the speaker and traditional Chinese
morals. All these phenomena are influenced by differences between Occidental
culture and Oriental culture as culture is influenced by environmental adaptations
and historical factors (Lustig, 1988). We will analyze the cultural roots that lead to
the differences of face and politeness reflected in the speech act of request. Geert
Hofstede (1984), Emeritus Professor at Maastricht University, developed four
dimensions to differentiate cultures: Power Distance (PDI), Individualism (IDV),
Masculinity (MAS), and Uncertainty Avoidance (UAI). In this thesis, we will
discuss the first two (Power Distance and Individualism) and a derived one:
Thought Pattern as they are closely related to our gist.

4.1 Hierarchy v.s. Equality

Power Distance refers to how people respond to other individuals who have
superior, or inferior, positions to themselves. People in high power distance
cultures are taught to honor others because of the positions they hold. People in
low power distance cultures consider all people much more equally. Chinese
society is a typical high-power-distance society in which hierarchy exists and is
accepted. Historically, Chinese society is based on the patriarchal clan system
which may be traced back to the Dynasty of West Zhou around 11th century B.C.
Such a society is composed of communities and constructed as a hierarchy of
which the emperor is at the top, the serf at the bottom and in the middle are the
governmental officials, rich businessman, landlords and artisans. People sharing

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the same male ancestor “live close together and form a community, trace their line
of descent, set up a clan temple and elect a clan head, usually an old and rich
landlord, of a higher generation (Ding Wangdao, 1997: 221-222).” In the clan, the
positions of the people are ranked according to their generation, political position
and property etc. In such a society, the social norms are stipulated by
Confucianism, the dominating thought in China. Confucianism emphasizes “Li”,
which refers to “the norms and means for achieving the acceptable ends of social
life (Jia Yuxin, 1999)” and tries to maintain the hierarchy of the society.
Confucianism stresses the right of the emperor, the father as well as the husband:
the courtier should absolutely submit to the emperor, the son to the father, and the
wife to the husband. Mencius brought up “Five Morals”, regulating the
relationship between father and son, emperor and courtier, husband and wife, older
and younger, and friends, which also belongs to “Li”: the father, the emperor, the
husband, and the elder should be affectionate to the son, the courtier, the wife, and
the younger; conversely, the son, the courtier, the wife, and the younger should
show filial obedience or devotion for the father, the emperor, the husband and the
elder; and friends should have faith in each other (父子有亲、君臣有义、夫妻有别、
长幼有序、朋友有信). Everyone has his/her own identity in the society and the

family and needs to behave according to his/her identity obeying the norms and
rules stipulated by “Li”. If people in lower positions break the norms, they lose
their faces and if people in higher positions act as those in lower positions, the
latter would be frightened. That is why Chinese people care about their faces so
much and politeness depends on the relationship between the interlocutors.
Western society is low-power-distance society in which inequality should be
minimized. In history, western people were organized in terms of city-states on the

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basis of contract which bound them together. Kinship relationships were no longer
the band to combine people together in early times. In early sixth century B.C., the
political reform resulted in citizens’ democratic rights in political affairs. The
social structure was not based on hierarchy but equality. Christianity spread into
Europe in the first century and became the leading thought in the Western
countries. Religiously, western countries advocate “Everyone is equal before God”
and thus politically, “Everyone is equal before law” is advocated. According to
such notions, everyone is in equal position and has equal right. Nobody can
impose on others and people deal with affairs without consideration of people’s
rank or position. This is the reason why Western people care about negative faces
so much. As everyone is equal in society, nobody can impose on others. People
often address others directly by given names even though the addressee is in a
higher generation or social position. And it is the same for all the people to
achieve politeness in making requests.

4.2 Collectivism v.s. Individualism

Hofstede’s Individualism dimension centers on whether societies emphasize
individual or group achievement and how they handle interpersonal relationships.
Individualism vs. Collectivism speaks to how individuals relate to others within
the society. Individualist societies teach people to go it alone; collectivist societies
teach people to participate in groups. In history, China was a united nation with
people living on a piece and sharing what they own. Chinese society is
traditionally a collectivistic one and “Ren”, the core of Confucianism, aims at
maintaining the social tranquility of the nation and the harmony of groups.
According to Confucianism, everyone belongs to and should submit to the group
and the nation. Chinese people are required to worry about the nation before others

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and relax after other people. The individual should sacrifice to save the benefit of
the group when necessary. Everyone is a part of and represents the community
he/she lives in; therefore, to lose one’s face is to lose the face of the community
he/she lives in. Chinese people care for their own face in case of losing the face of
his group. This is the reason why Chinese people are very careful in making
requests. They use proper addressing terms, supportive moves as well as strategies
in order to be polite and appropriate because they would lose the face of their
groups if they break the norms. Collectivism also differentiates in-groups from
out-groups. Everyone is in a closer relationship with an in-group member than an
out-group member. Hence, in-group members, including close friends, often use
direct strategies in making requests while people tend to use more indirect
strategies towards out-group members. “Ren” means “to love people”.
Confucianism asks people to be kind, warm, and benevolent to others. As a result,
Chinese people are often ready to offer help to others’ requests and try their best to
help even when they have some difficulty. The whole nation is considered as a big
family and all the people are supposed to live in harmony with each other. In such
a collectivist society like China, individualism is considered as cold and not
supportive.
Individualism dominates western society. Both Europe and America have their
historical factors for it. In the latter part of the Middle Ages, private ownership
system got into the interior of families in Europe. Family members, including
father and son, brothers, as well as husband and wife, own their respective
possessions, which provided the financial basis for the independence of every
member in the family. The democratic policy provided political protection for
individualism, and Christianity, the dominating thought in the West, also advocates

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individualism and provided religious basis for it. According to Christianity,

everyone was born selfish and should strive for himself/herself. America was
founded by European Protestants who came to America to seek for freedom
because of the political oppression in their own countries. Individualism became a
tradition before the beginning of the nation. They had to struggle for life without
anyone to rely on. Great importance was attached to the self-dependence and
individual success. From generation to generation, the individualism of American
has been formed and affects people a lot. Benjamin Franklin said, “God help those
who help themselves.” In such a individualism-dominated society, people seek for
self-freedom and self-independence. They would like to think by themselves and
make their own choices. Consequently, people should not impose on anyone else
because imposition is against self-freedom. This is the reason why even invitations
are face-threatening acts and negative face is very important in Western countries
according to B&L’s face theory. Since request is intrinsically face-threatening in
Occidental culture, people need to minimize the cost to others and maximize the
benefit to themselves to achieve politeness.

4.3 Inductive v.s. Deductive

Different cultures have different thought patterns. As we discussed above, Chinese
culture is a collective culture. People belong to the community they live in and
represent the community. People who fight for their country are sung high praise
for as heroes and those who made great achievements are considered as honors of
groups they live in. People behave modestly and cautiously for fear of losing the
face of their communities and try to get on well with the all the people around
them. Besides the harmony of interpersonal relationship, Chinese people also
believe in the oneness between man and nature. They are obedient to nature and

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abide by the laws of nature. They adjust their activities to the alternation of night
and day as well as the changes of seasons. In one word, Chinese pursue harmony
between man and nature and also harmony among people. Under such a collective
culture, Chinese people emphasize wholeness in thinking. Their thought pattern is
intuitive, specific and circular. On the contrary, Western culture is individual
culture. In Western countries, people are often encouraged to strive by themselves.
They like to create new ways for themselves and develop new styles of living.
They pursue personal enjoyment, let alone personality and develop freely. They
admire individual will, individual freedom, and individual accomplishment. On
the relationship between man and nature, they believe it is dividedness with man
and nature opposing to each other. Man should control and reconstruct nature.
Failures to obtain the desired things or positions do not result from destiny, but the
laziness or the lack of fighting spirits. They emphasize on efficiency. Therefore,
their thought patterns are logic, analytical, and linear.
Thought pattern is closely related to structure of discourse. Generally
speaking, thought pattern decides the way of discourse organization. Many
scholars have done researches on the relationship between thought pattern and
structure of discourse. Robert B. Kaplan (1967), the most influencing scholar in
this field, listed five different thought patterns as the following:
Chinese & Korean English Latin Russian Semite

(Jia Yuxin, 1997: 391)

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Many scholars agree that these thought patterns represent the characteristics of
discourse organizations in different cultures.
As we can see from the above diagram, Chinese thought pattern is circular and
hence Chinese discourse is also circular and inductive. When Chinese speak or
write, they often draw in the points back to the starting place after they cast their
thoughts around the beginning and thus make their discourse a circular one. They
often avoid their topics at the beginning but start with the broad situation, such as
time, space, or reasons. Then they go from the whole to the partial, from big to
small, from far to near, from general to specific, and finally present the most
important contents or the key points such as requesting others to do something,
their own ideas, suggestions to others, etc. at the end. When Chinese people talk
about something, they do not often go directly to the topic but develop from
unimportant to important, from background knowledge to the task, from relevant
information to the topic, etc. Therefore, when Chinese people make a request, they
often state their reasons or background first to arouse requestees’ sympathy or
understanding of their situations and get the requestees ready for the coming
request in mind. Only after all these are done will they put forward their requests.
Jia Yuxin (1997) summarized the structure of Chinese discourse as the following
patterns:
“Because A, and Because B, and Because C, therefore/So D”
“If… Then…”
“Although… But/yet…”
The reasons, conditions or concessions are often placed before the topic which is
the most important content. This is the reason why in Chinese requests the
supportive moves are always before the head acts and there are many supportive

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moves in Chinese requests.

English thought pattern is linear and the discourse structure is deductive.
When native English speakers talk or write, they often put the topic at the very
beginning and give the reasons or explanations to the topic in the following part.
In making requests, they put their requests directly at the very beginning and are
often at a loss when Chinese people state many, many reasons but do not present
the request itself.

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Chapter 5 Conclusion
In this thesis, we made a survey on Chinese requests and found that Chinese
requests are different from English ones in many aspects and that such differences
reflect different politeness standards between Occidental culture and Oriental
culture. When making a request, Chinese people pay much attention to the social
status of both the requester and requestee as well as the relationship between these
two interlocutors. They choose different addressing terms to different addresees
while native English speakers use very few ones. They make their syntactic
choices and strategic choice of requests mainly on the basis of the interlocutors’
social statuses and their relationship, including the age, sex, familiarity and social
power, etc. Chinese people pay attention to the positive face of the interlocutors
which is identified in B&L’s face theory. They use more supportive moves and
place them before the head act to save the positive faces of themselves. They use
more direct strategies to show closeness with the requestees and save both
interlocutors’ positive faces. In making or responding to requests, Chinese people
obey traditional Chinese moralities. They use kinship addressing terms and direct
strategies to show friendliness. They use few hints so as to be frank. They are
often warm enough to try their best to help the requesters. All these phenomena
have their roots in Occidental and Oriental cultures. Traditionally, Chinese society
is a hierarchical one in which Confucius emphasizes “Li”. Chinese people are
required to behave according to their own social statuses and obey the rules
stipulated by “Li”. In such a collectivistic society as Chinese, people pay attention
to their positive faces in order to save the faces of the communities. Occidental
society is totally different, they emphasize equality and advocates individualism
which lead to the different appearances of requests in English from Chinese.

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What’s more, Chinese thought pattern is different from western thought pattern.
The former is a circular one while the latter is a linear one. Consequently, Chinese
people use different organizations from Western people in making requests.
After we analyzed the differences of requests and causes listed above, we hope
that people will be aware of the different communicating styles and try to avoid
pragmatic failures in intercultural communication. Besides the instance about
requests we mentioned at the beginning of this thesis, many pragmatic failures
take place quite frequently when Chinese communicate with Western people. For
example, Chinese people often deny the praise of others to be modest while
Western people often show thanks to people who praise them. People unaware of
such a cultural difference may transfer the pragmatic characteristics of their
mother tongue to other languages. A well-known example is that a Chinese
bridegroom responded to the praise of his bride by “Where, Where (哪里哪里)” to
be modest and his response frightened the Western guest who praised the beauty of
his bride. The Western guest thought that the praise was not enough and praised
the bride from the head to the feet. By analyzing the differences and causes in one
aspect, we warn people to be alert to various cultural differences and use an
English way to associate with native English speaker when necessary. Jia Yuxin
(1997) gives us an example of Li Hongzhang’s speech which caused a lawsuit
from the boss of the restaurant. Li Hongzhang, a minister in Qing Dynasty, held a
feast in America to acknowledge the foreign guests. He said to the guests:
“今天，承蒙各位光临，我感到非常荣幸。我们备有粗馔，聊表寸心，
不成敬意，请大家多多包涵。”
(Jia Yuxin, 1997: 37)
When the translated version was inserted in the newspaper the second day, the

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boss of the restaurant thought that Li Hongzhang stained the reputation of the
restaurant and decided to accuse him of encroaching upon the reputation of the
restaurant. What caused the problem is that Li Hongzhang used a Chinese way of
showing politeness. He considered the food, the restaurant and himself as
in-groups because all of them are on hosts’ side compared with the foreign guests.
According to Gu’s self-denigration maxim (1990), Li Hongzhang showed
respectfulness and modesty by denigrating the hosts including the food he
provided and elevating the guests. But in America, a country in which
individualism is the most important, the boss of the restaurant considered Li
Hongzhang and himself as separate individuals and Li Hongzhang’s denigration of
his restaurant had constructed a stain of the restaurant’s reputation.
How can people be aware of the different communicating styles and avoid
pragmatic failures in intercultural communication? Many intellects working in
wholly foreign-funded companies or joint ventures make pragmatic failures
frequently though they have studied and used English for more than twenty years.
The reason lies in the fact that they didn’t learn cultural differences systematically
during the course of their English learning so that their communicative
competence is much lower than their linguistic competence. Therefore, English
teacher do not only have the task of teaching students linguistic skills such as
vocabulary, grammar, etc., they also need to teach students communicative skills
to improve students’ communicative competence. According to Canale & Swain
(1980), and Canale (1983), communicative competence is composed of:
1. Grammatical competence: concerned with mastery of the language code
itself.
2. Discourse competence: concerns mastery of how to combine grammatical

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

forms and meanings to a unified spoken or written text in different genres.

3. Socio-linguistic competence: addresses the extent to which utterances are
produced and understood appropriately in different socio-linguistic
contexts depending on contextual factors.
4. Strategic competence: is composed of a mastery of verbal and non-verbal
communication strategies that may be called into action for two main
reasons: (1) to compensate for breakdowns in communication due to
limiting conditions in actual communication or to insufficient competence
in one or more of the other areas of communicative competence; and (2) to
enhance the effectiveness of communication.
But most Chinese students are only good at the grammatical competence, and have
quite limited knowledge in the other three aspects. Such a situation calls for the
teaching of intercultural communication to all the students in the university. To
achieve this purpose, the author makes three suggestions:
1. Training the teachers. When the author was a student in the university,
there was no course of intercultural communication at all. As teachers play
a very important role in students’ learning, they should have a good
mastery of intercultural communication themselves. Fortunately, in recent
years, intercultural communication has been included in the English
majors’ curriculum in some universities so that some English teachers and
some future English teachers can be very beneficial to their students’
communicative competence. More present English teachers all over the
country need to be trained as they did not learn intercultural
communication systematically, and we hope that all English majors will
take the course in every university.

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

2. Modifying the textbooks. Most English majors are more competent than
non-English majors in intercultural communication; however, more
non-English majors go to work in foreign-funded enterprises or joint
ventures. Most college English textbooks, which are designed for
non-English majors, are compiled in a traditional way, emphasizing the
vocabulary, grammar, reading, and writing. Though there do exist some
cultural notes in most of them, it is far from enough for students to master
the communicative skills in English. Therefore, the author suggests that
communication skills and cultural differences should be contained in all
the college English textbooks and every teacher be required to explain
them to students.
3. Ameliorating the tests. All the students have taken numerous tests when
they graduate from universities and often get high scores in the tests, but
they are not good at communicating with native English speakers. From
the high scores they get, we can make a judgment that Chinese students are
clever and diligent. But due to the lack of cultural questions or exercises in
the test paper, students do not pay much attention to it because their
achievements are often judged by the scores in the tests for which they
often make very good preparations. For a long history, cultural differences
are not contained in the English tests, including proficiency tests, like
mid-term exams and final-term exams, and proficiency tests, such as
TOEFL, CET, PETS, etc. All the tests are not designed to test students’
communicative skills but linguistic skills. Therefore, it is a great task to
ameliorate the English testing systems, accommodated to the reform of
textbooks.

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On the whole, we hope that this study is rewarding and more researches in
intercultural communication will be done so that Chinese students can benefit a lot
and adjust themselves to the world by improving their communicative
competences.

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Appendix I: Questionnaire of Requests (the English version)

Sex：_______ Age：_______
Instructions
Eight situations are described below. Please write down what you would say as if you

were speaking. There are no right or wrong answers, and you are not going to be given a

“Mark” on your responses. Thank you very much for your participation!

Situation 1: A student asks his/her roommate to clean up the kitchen the latter had
left in a mess the night before. If you were the student, what would you and your
roommate say?
The student:
The roommate:
Situation 2: A young woman wants to get rid of a man pestering her on the street.
If you were the woman, what would you and the man say?
The woman:
The man:
Situation 3: A student asks another student to lend her some lecture notes. If you
were the girl, what would you and the student say?
The girl:
The student:
Situation 4: A student asks people living on the same street for a ride home. If you
were the student, what would you and the driver say?
The student:
The driver:
Situation 5: An applicant calls for information on a job advertised in a paper. If
you were the applicant, what would you and the receiver say?

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The applicant:
The receiver:
Situation 6: A policeman asks a driver to move her car. If you were the policeman,
what would you and the driver say?
The policeman:
The driver:
Situation 7: A student asks a teacher for an extension on a seminar paper. If you
were the student, what would you and the teacher say?
The student:
The teacher:
Situation 8: A university professor asks a student to give his lecture a week earlier
than scheduled. If you were the professor, what would you and the student say?
The professor:
The student:

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

Appendix II: Questionnaire of Requests (the Chinese version)

性别：_______ 年龄：_______
说明：
下面描述了八个场景，请你按平时的习惯真实地给予回答，回答不分对错，也不评

分，谢谢你的参与！

情景 1：你是一名学生，和另一名同学合住一个套间，同学昨晚将厨房弄得很
乱，你要同学将厨房打扫一下。
学生：
同学：
情景 2：你是一名青年女士，在大街上被一个男子纠缠，你想摆脱他的纠缠。
女士：
男人：
情景 3：你是一名女生，想要另一名同学把课堂笔记借给你看看。
女生：
同学：
情景 4：你是一名学生，家住同街的人开着车，你要他顺路带你回去。
学生：
开车者：
情景 5： 你是一名求职者，看到报纸上的招聘信息，打电话想了解一下情况。
求职者：
接电话者：
情景 6：你是一名警察，看见一名司机将车停靠在非安全地带，你要司机将车
移动一下地方。
警察：
司机：

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

情景 7：你是一名学生，某课程论文你不能按时完成，你请老师让你延迟上交。
学生：
老师：
情景 8：你是一名大学教授，原本安排好一名学生某日演讲，现在请该同学提
前一周进行。
教授：
学生：

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

Appendix III: The Original Chinese Letter for Chapter Three

尊敬的澳广节目主持人：
我作为贵台英语教学节目和《你喜欢的歌》节目的忠实听众已有好几年的
历史了。我认为贵台的这两个节目办得非常好。
请让我做个自我介绍：我是一名中学生，今年十八岁，我的家乡哈密市，
是一个边疆小城，文化活动办得也不错。由于我是喜欢学习英语，所以这方
面的电台节目比较注意，但是因为中央人民广播电台的英语节目比较深奥，
不适合我学习，所以我一直从贵台的英语节目里得到听力、会话能力训练。
这种训练使我受益非浅。随着课程难度一步步的提高，我深感没有一本教材，
学习会遇到很多困难。因为这个原因，我抽出时间给贵台写这封信，希望能
得到一本贵台英语节目的教材。教材的费用请来信告知。
另外，我希望得到贵台印制的年历，并祝澳广的普通话节目办得更加有趣。

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 HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

哈尔滨工业大学硕士学位论文原创性声明

本人郑重声明：此处所提交的硕士学位论文《汉英请求言语行为对比研
究》，是本人在导师指导下，在哈尔滨工业大学攻读硕士学位期间独立进行研
究工作所取得的成果。据本人所知，论文中除已注明部分外不包含他人已发
表或撰写过的研究成果。对本文的研究工作做出重要贡献的个人和集体，均
已在文中以明确方式注明。本声明的法律结果将完全由本人承担。

作者签字： 日期： 年 月 日

哈尔滨工业大学硕士学位论文使用授权书

《汉英请求言语行为对比研究》系本人在哈尔滨工业大学攻读硕士学位
期间在导师指导下完成的硕士学位论文。本论文的研究成果归哈尔滨工业大
学所有，本论文的研究内容不得以其它单位的名义发表。本人完全了解哈尔
滨工业大学关于保存、使用学位论文的规定，同意学校保留并向有关部门送
交论文的复印件和电子版本，允许论文被查阅和借阅，同意学校将论文加入
《中国优秀博硕士学位论文全文数据库》和编入《中国知识资源总库》。本人
授权哈尔滨工业大学，可以采用影印、缩印或其他复制手段保存论文，可以
公布论文的全部或部分内容。

本学位论文属于（请在以上相应方框内打“√”）：
保密□，在 年解密后适用本授权书
不保密□

作者签名： 日期： 年 月 日
导师签名： 日期： 年 月 日

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 Hit Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree

Acknowledgements
My deepest gratitude first goes to Professor Jia Yuxin, my supervisor, whose help
goes well beyond teaching me how to do academic research. He is such a kind teacher
that always helps and encourages me. During the two years at Harbin Institute of
Technology, what I have learned from him is not only theories in linguistics but also
how to do research, how to think and how to live my life. He read the entire
manuscript and gave me insightful suggestions which led to the improvement in the
analysis and the presentation of ideas. I will never forget his strict demands,
affectionate smile and timely suggestions to me.
I would also like to express my gratitude to Prof. Wang Guizhi, Prof. Lu Gan,
Prof. Ma Lin and all the other professors who gave us courses and lectures at HIT, the
knowledge I learned form them helped me lay the foundations of my future career.
Their instruction is the most impayable treasure that will surely benefit me for a
lifetime.
I am grateful to the students living in the room opposite to my dormitory who
helped me complete the questionnaires I prepared. Finally, I give my sincere thanks to
all other people who have given me help on writing this thesis.

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