以英语为母语的汉语学习者请求言语行为的语用发展.PDFVIP

Pragmatic Development in Request Performance by English-speaking Learners of Chinese 以英语为母语的汉语学习者请求言语行为的语用发展 Xiaohong Wen University of Houston Abstract Requests have been one of the most frequently examined speech acts in Interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) (Schauer, 2009). The early research on the ILP of requests focused on first language pragmatic transfer, comparisons between NSs and NNSs, and cross-cultural contrastive analysis (Blum-Kulka, 1982; Blum-Kulka Levenston, 1987; Blum-Kulka Olshtain, 1984; Faerch Kasper, 1989; House, 1989; House Kasper, 1987). This tradition continues today (e.g., Puetz Neff van Aertselaer, 2008). In comparison, pragmatic development has been a much less researched area (Kasper and Schmidt, 1996; Rose, 2000). In addition, most of the studies on ILP have focused on English as a second language (L2). Studies on the acquisition of ILP with Chinese as a second/foreign language are few. The present study is an attempt to address the shortage of developmental pragmatics research and the scarcity of research on Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). The present study draws upon Brown Levinsons (1987) politeness theory to examine CFL learners requests under different sociopragmatic situations. Politeness is the most basic notion of pragmatic function. Although this notion is shared by people across all cultures, different cultures may have different principles for politeness. Accordingly, different languages may use different politeness strategies in making requests. Blum-Kulka, House, Kasper (1989) categorized request strategies in terms of degrees of directness. They also developed the coding manual that contains a scheme for internal and external modifications. This study uses the schemes of Blum-Kulka et al.s (1989) and Zhang (1995). The two research questions