The Speech Act of Requesting in Spoken Chinese: An Approach Based on Task-oriented Interactions
| Autor: | Hao-Rong Tso, 左浩蓉 |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2017 |
| Druh dokumentu: | 學位論文 ; thesis |
| Popis: | 105 Request is one of the most common speech acts in daily communications and interactions. The nature of the speech act of request has the possibility of humiliating the participants of the interaction thus it imposes certain level of burden to the speaker, which is called face-threatening acts (FTA) by Brown and Levinson''s politeness theory. Therefore, when Chinese learners try to use the speech act of request in the appropriate way, they should take the social relationships between both sides of communication, the context of speech, and the degree of difficulty for request into account in order to choose the proper request strategies. According to Blum-Kulka, House & Kasper (1989)’s research, the sequences of request can be classified into three parts, including head acts, and two optional parts—alerters and supportive moves. When studying “request”, previous studies generally tend to use the Discourse completion tasks (DCTs) to collect data. But it turns out that the subjects in DCTs tend to respond in a short, common sense form, so it’s not easy to observe the natural speech performance. On the other hand, whether it’s suitable to use the form of writing to collect oral data is doubtful. Therefore, he results of the survey of DCTs can’t be used to reflect the speech performance of speaker in the actual situation of natural communication. However, this study doesn''t only talk about Chinese request in oral situations, but also focuses on how to collect natural oral data and which approach is the most proper way in this study. Before the data collection for this study, there is a definition of the speech act of request, the strategic frameworks of Chinese request based on previous research results. Furthermore, the comparison and assessment of different kinds of previous research methods is also included. In addition, there are four research variants be set up, which are the differences of social distance, age, gender and the degree of difficulty. According to the research needs, this study decides to use “task-based activity” to collect the semi-natural oral data of request. To set up the four research variants above, these variables are added to the subject''s conditional setting for the task-based activity in this study. As a result, there is the analysis and discussion of data collection reveals that conventionally indirect strategy is the most frequent strategy of head acts in Chinese request, which accounts for 52.5%(189/360), and social factors would decide on the choice of an appropriate form of request strategies. In terms of alerters, “address form” is the most frequent strategy in Chinese request which accounts for 60.1%(172/286), and it’s also relatively complex and indicating mutual social relationships in certain language environment. Lastly, in terms of supportive acts, the frequency of “Cause explanation” is quite high, which accounts for 41.2%(91/221). |
| Databáze: | Networked Digital Library of Theses & Dissertations |
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