Politeness In Language Analysis

Introduction

1.1 Defining requests

People do things with words, which is a basic tenet of pragmatic approaches to language. Requests are an especially significant aspect of language, because much of what we do in communication revolves around our desire to get someone else to do something (Carroll, 1986). Requests, in Ellis' opinion, "are attempts on the part of a speaker to get the hearer to perform or to stop performing some kind of action" (Ellis, 1994: 167). For Green (1975: 120), it is "the polite method for getting the hearer to do a specific action". Goffman (1971) defines a request as a type of ritual that asks "license of a potentially offended person to engage in what could be considered a violation of his rights... At the same time,

1978): hearers can interpret requests as intrusive impingement on freedom of action, or even as a show on the exercise of power; speakers may hesitate to make the request for fear of exposing a need or risking the hearer's loss of face. Therefore, requests, by its very nature, call for mitigation and compensation for their impositive effect on the hearer by means of a polite and tactful behavior. Thereby, requests are closely related to politeness strategies and face work.

1.2 Why study Chinese learners' realization of requests

It is universally acknowledged that the present world is becoming a "global village" in which human beings are being exposed to the increasing depth and frequency of contacts with other cultures, which inevitably demands adequate communicative competence (Hymes, 1972) to achieve efficient and successful interchange. The knowledge required to perform illocutionary acts such as requests constitutes part of 2 Chinese Learners ' Realization ofRequests in

g. Canale & Swain, 1980), researchers are giving increasing attention to pragmatic aspects of learner language. Many studies of second language acquisition have investigated the ways nonnative language users select and realize speech acts since the early 1980. In regard to requests, a number of studies have been carried out by contrasting native with nonnative performance (e.g. Walters, 1981; Fraser & Nolen, 1981; Blum-Kulka, House & Kasper, 1 989; Edmondson & House, 1991). These studies cover different learner population with a variety of linguistic and cultural backgrounds. But the attention has been focused on learners' speech act realization, namely, most of the studies concentrate on communication rather than learning. These studies of interlanguage pragmatics demonstrated that second language speakers might fail to communicate effectively (commit pragmatic failures), even when they have an excellent grammatical and lexical command of the target