http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/292554374

Request strategies : a comparative study in Mandarin Chinese and Korean

This thesis investigates request strategies based on data from Mandarin Chinese and Korean. There have been numerous efforts to identify universal norms or strategies in the realization of request speech act in cross-cultural pragmatics. One of the well known is the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989). However, there has been little work on East Asian languages, particularly between Chinese and Korea. An investigation in this area would be unprecedented, and makes an invaluable contribution to the study of speech acts. The current study will also use a better methodology, in that unlike most previous studies the data is a combination of role-plays and spontaneous speech, providing a sufficient and natural data collection. The methodology adapts the principles used by the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project, but a modified version of its coding system is used to suit the different linguistic characteristics of the two East Asian languages. Data have been collected in a workplace setting, role-plays by video-taping and naturally occurring data by audio-taping among office workers, collected in Korea and China at two medium-sized companies in white-collar environments.

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