“中介策略”在数字化故事叙述中的应用：大学英语写作个案研究

Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Research Background
Since the formation, the cross-cultural pragmatics has made a rapid development. In  the  West,  cross-cultural  pragmatics  was  studied  in  the  aspects  of  cross-cultural pragmatic linguistics, cross-cultural social pragmatics and inter-language pragmatics, and there have been many achievements. For example, Keenan carried out a control analysis  on  the  language  situations  in  the  Malagasy  Republic  with  the  conversation cooperative principle in 1976 and found that the people there often did not follow the "quantitative criterion", "Although they have the required information, they often give less  information  to  the  hearer  than  required,",  accordingly,  she  raised  "shelving criterion". In 1983, Leach analyzed the differences of importance of each criterion in politeness  principle  under  different  cultures.  In  1993,  Casper  and  Bloom  -  Mikulka also  published  a  book  entitled  Cross-cultural  Pragmatics.  China  began  to  pay attention to cross-cultural pragmatics in the 1980s and 1990s, there were a number of papers  discussing  the  studies  on  cross-cultural  pragmatics,  covering  cross-cultural pragmatics  contrast,  cross-cultural  pragmatic  competence,  cross-cultural  pragmatic adaptation, cross cultural pragmatic failure, cross-cultural pragmatic stipulation. There have  been  some  works  associated  with  cross-cultural  pragmatics,  such  as  Deng Yanchang and Liu Runqing’s Language and Culture (Foreign Language Teaching and Research  Press,  1989),  Wang  Fuxiang’s  Collected  Contrastive  Linguistics  Papers (Foreign  Language  Teaching  and  Research  Press,  1992),  Wang  Dexing’s  English Discourse Analysis and Intercultural Communication (Beijing Language and Culture University Press, 1998), Hu Wenzhong, Lin Dajin, Jia Yuxin and other scholars have also published a book entitled Cross-cultural Communication.
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1.2 Research Questions 
As indicated in the paper title, this study is to describe and explain the similarities and differences of request strategy in English and Chinese by comparisons based on actual surveys of Americans and Chinese. The choice of request act is mainly because it is widely used in various aspects of daily life, such as requesting others to pass the salt at dinner or requesting others to turn down the television when we sleep. From the studies of Lyons (1977), Searle (1979), Leech (1983), Searle & Vanderveken (1985) and  Tsui  (2000)  on  request  act  and  our  findings,  it  seems  that  we  can  make  such  a conclusion  on  request  act:  the  speaker  tries  to  get  the  hearer  to  do  or  stop  doing something  in  communication,  while  the  hearer  is  entitled  to  refuse  or  cooperate.  It should  be  noted  that  request  act  is  a  future  act,  and  should  be  within  the  hearer’s might.  This  definition  can  be  fully  confirmed  in  the  most  widely  used  habitually indirect request strategy.  The strategy here doesn’t refer to the "morbid skill to please others " described by Braiker  (2001)  (in  order  to  be  so-called  "good"  man,  the  people’s  act  shall  be consistent  with  the  ten  "must"  requirements),  but  refers  to  a  speaker’s  taking  full advantage  of  all  the  strategies  he  could  think  of  and  not  being  limited  to  a  single language means so as to achieve the best communication effect when expressing the request in specific communicative context. In other words, speech strategy is to obtain the  corresponding  communicative  purposes  by  using  propriate  vocabulary, grammatical  structure,  sentence  selection,  discourse  arrangement  and  intonation treatment. 
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Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 Cross-cultural Pragmatics 
The first half of the 20th century saw the peak of structural linguistics. 60 years later,  the  changes  of  two  aspects  make  linguistics  study  show  a  flourishing  and contending  situation.  One  is  the  lateral  expansion.  The  linguistic  study  is  no  longer like  what  proclaimed  by  Chomsky,  "the  matter  to  be  concerned  about  in  linguistic theory is a conjectured speaker and hearer, the language of the community he lived is pure, and he understands the language of this community very much.", but begins to focus  on  language  phenomenon,  language  function  and  language  application  in  the real  society,  and  social  linguistics,  functional  linguistics,  discourse  linguistics, comparative  linguistics,  psycholinguistics,  computational  linguistics  and  other sub-disciplines  emerged.  The  second  is  the  vertical  development.  Linguistics  study has no longer been like what was advocated by Bloomfield: "the description work of language is to make more stringent analysis on the language form and simultaneously assume that these language forms have a solid meaning which can be determined". In addition to the systematic study on the language structure, scholars also begin to give full  attention  to  and  study  another  important  property  –  meaning,  rather  than  is dwelled  on  the  meaning   assumption,  which  leads  to  the  rise  and  development  of semantics and pragmatics. Or, from the structure to the meaning and then to dynamic meaning,  a  Syntax-Semantics-Pragmatics  development  venation  of  linguistics  which is developing longitudinally has been formed.  
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2.2 Request Speech Act
Speech  act  theory  is  one  of  the  important  topics  of  the  pragmatic  study,  which was raised by the linguist Austin in 1960s and 1970s. Language is not only a tool of describing the objective world, but an act--speech act. Later, the linguist Searle went further  and  took  this  theory  as  a  theory  that  can  explain  human  language communication.  He  believes  the  smallest  unit  of  language  communication  is  speech act.  He  systematically  developed  the  speech  act  theory  raised  by  Austin,   provided linguistic  philosophy  as  the  theoretical  basis  for  the  speech  act,  clarified  the classification  principles  and  standards  of  speech  acts,  and  further  proposed  the indirect speech act theory. Request speech act is widely used in a variety of sense of daily life, such as requesting others to pass the salt at dinner or requesting others to turn  down  the  television  when  we  sleep.  From  the  studies  of  Lyons  (1977),  Searle (1979),  Leech  (1983),  Searle  &  Vanderveken (1985)  and  Tsui  (2000)  on  the  request act  and  findings  from  many  scholars  in  China,  it  seems  that  we  can  deduce  such  a understanding on the request act: the speaker tries to get the hearer to do or stop doing something  in  communication,  while  the  hearer  is  entitled  to  refuse  to  cooperate. Cross-cultural  studies  have  shown  that  individualism/collectivism,  low  context/high context are two broad dimensions related to cultural diversity, which largely control the  cross-cultural  communication.  
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Chapter Three Research Methodology .......22 
3.1 Investigation Object....22 
3.2 Investigation Tools and Implementation Methods .....22 
Chapter Four Investigation Results and Analysis .....24 
4.1 Differences of Request Strategy .....24 
4.2 Cross-Cultural Factors ....29 
4.3 Politeness Principles....35 
4.4 Face Maxim .......40 
Chapter Five    Conclusion ....43 
5.1 Major Findings .......43 
5.2 Limitations of the Present Research........43 
5.3 Suggestions for Future Research ........44 

Chapter Four Investigation Results and Analysis

4.1 Differences of Request Strategy
4.1.1 Bald on Record Strategy
The studies of many scholars such as Searle (1976), Ervin -Tripp (1977), House (1986),  Blum-kulka  (1987),  Blum-kulka  &  House  (1089),  Blum-kulka,  et  al  (1989), Ellis  (1994  ),  Liao  (1997)  and  Gibbs  (1998)  have  found  that  the  request  act  is completed generally with two communication strategies: bald on record strategy and off  record  strategy.  Bald  on  record  strategy  is  commonly  achieved  with  imperative, performative  or  declarative  sentences  and  off  record  strategy  uses  conventional indirect means and non-conventional indirect means (or hints). In summary, there are three  methods:  direct  request  strategy  (eg:.  Shut  the  window),  conventional  indirect strategy (eg: Can you shut the window?) and non-conventional indirect strategy (It’s cold here.). Table  1  clearly  shows  the  Chinese  and  English  people  mostly  adopt  indirect communication strategies to achieve the request act, but the frequency of the former with direct strategy is significantly higher than the latter. Leech has said that the more indirect the more polite. Chinese group uses more direct strategies, does it mean they are  rude,  or  English  group  is  more  polite?  There  is  no  doubt  that  the  answer  is negative.  However,  due  to  differences  in  cultural  values,  the  politeness  strategies  of request  act  are  also  different,  thus  forming  different  request  speech  styles  and resulting  in  the  differences  shown  in  the  table  above.
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Conclusion

We  come  to  the  following  conclusions  based  on  the  similarities  and  differences between  Chinese  and  English  request  strategies  discussed  in  this  paper:  (1)  in  the three request strategy types, conventional indirect strategy is the most frequently used request strategy; (2) the direct strategy in Chinese is an appropriate and effective way to express request, on the contrary, direct strategy is rarely used in English. Thus, in China, it is not accurate that more direct more polite, direct strategy would be more appropriate in many cases; (3) Upon completion of the request act, both primary act speech and secondary act speech reflect a distinct social and cultural characteristics. In  cross-cultural  communications,  the  correct  use  of  English  and  Chinese  request speech act can reduce barriers to communication and avoid many embarrassments, so as  to  achieve  the  purpose  of  successful  communication.  Through  real  evidence,  this paper  carries  out  a  comparative  analysis  from  two  cultural  value  factors.  There  are also many factors affecting request speech acts, for example, one will treat different people  according  to  their  different  ages,  genders,  the  degree  of  their  direct/indirect speech. There should be more extensive and deep studies on cross-cultural pragmatics in this field. 
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The reference (omitted)