Intracultural comparison of request speech act between Mainland Chinese Mandarin and Malaysian Chinese Mandarin

Recognized as a face-threatening act and an indispensable social activity in interpersonal communication, the request speech act has been studied by many previous studies from intercultural or cross-cultural perspectives in interlanguage or cross-language contexts. However, little attention is paid to the request speech act in intralinguistic study from intra-cultural perspective. Inappropriate request would lead to the misunderstanding or tension of people’s relationship since request speech act is notorious for its face threatening nature. Request speech act needs to be investigated in order to improve communication between speakers. This study aims to find out the differences and similarities in terms of request head act strategy, as well as request modification and also investigate the impacts of three social variables, namely social distance, social power, and ranking of imposition on the use of request speech act in Mainland Chinese Mandarin and Malaysian Chinese Mandarin. 50 mainland Chinese and 50 Malaysian Chinese participants who were divided into four groups were recruited. Role-play instrument was used to elicit data. The collected data were analyzed by employing a revised combined theoretical framework. The results revealed that mainland Chinese participants preferred “direct” level of request head act strategy over Malaysian Chinese participants with significant differences, but there were no significant differences in the use of “conventionally indirect” level of request head act strategy and “non-conventionally indirect” level of request head act strategy. Variations existed in the use of four frequently used request head act strategies in Mainland Chinese Mandarin and Malaysian Chinese Mandarin, with statistically significant differences. The study also highlighted significant differences in the use of individual request modifiers, both internal modifiers and external modifiers. In addition, this study also found that three social variables had different degrees of impacts on the frequently used individual request head act strategies and request modifiers in different scenarios. And the impacts of these three social variables varied across scenarios and participant groups, with some scenarios independent of three social variables. This study is of considerable significance in terms of theory and practice. Theoretically, it proposed a revised combined theoretical framework based on the collected data. Practically, this study could help improve the communication between mainland Chinese and Malaysian Chinese people and it also has some implications for learning and teaching request speech act in Mainland Chinese Mandarin and Malaysian Chinese Mandarin.

Text 123254 edited.pdf Download (1MB) Official URL or Download Paper: http://ethesis.upm.edu.my/id/eprint/18720

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