It has been generally recognized in pragmatics that the speech act request, i.e., asking someone to do something, can be a face-threatening act (FTA); thus studies of requests have been traditionally associated with research on linguistic politeness, the mitigation of FTAs. Every culture has each own way of appropriately presenting the requests in different contexts; people from other cultures tend to perceive the social variables somewhat differently and interpret the behavior or utterances based on their own native language systems or culture conventions. As a result, misunderstandings are likely take place in cross-culture communication involving requests.
This study endeavors to explore the similarities and differences in requests in academic settings in three different languages—English, Russian and Chinese. A written questionnaire was designed to elicit request locutions made by 25 students who were native speakers of each language; in order to ensure that the requests were sensitive to contexts, the questionnaire included 14 everyday situations in an academic setting. The questionnaire also included a rating scale for the native speakers of each language to assess the weight of each situation; this elicited evidence for the native perception of each requestive situation and allowed comparison of cultural differences in assessment.
The dissertation compares and reveals the ways of making requests in the three languages in each requestive situation in terms not only of the strategies used in the core requests, but also of internal and external modifications within the request locutions.
While the primary goal of the dissertation is a linguistic comparison and analysis, it is the author's belief that such research has the potential to enhance, to some extent, mutual understanding in people of different cultures. In particular, being aware of how a second language phrases requests differently from one's native language can greatly reduce the potential for misunderstanding, increase the likelihood of obtaining one's requestive goal without causing offense, and in general enhance cross-cultural communication.