摘要：

请求作为言语行为的一种，在日常生活中扮演着重要的角色，而请求言语行为主要通过不同的请求策略实现。对中英请求策略的跨文化研究不仅可以给英语学习者指点迷津，还具有一定的教学意义。本研究在对60位以汉语为母语者和以英语为母语者进行问卷调查的基础上，采用实证研究的方法，结合调查所得数据和其他学者的研究成果分析并阐释了中英请求策略选择上的主要差异以及影响中英请求策略选择的关键因素，即会话者之间的社会距离和相对地位。

关键词：请求策略；问卷调查；主要差异；关键因素

Abstract:

As one kind of speech act, requests appear to be rather important in our daily life. Requests are actualized by means of request strategies. With more and more Chinese people learning and speaking English, the contrastive study on English and Chinese request strategies is of great pedagogical sense. With an investigation of 60 native speakers of English and Chinese and the analysis of the collected data and other researchers’ findings, this study illustrates the main differences concerning the use of English and Chinese request strategies. Additionally, the study also explores two key influencing factors in the choice of English and Chinese request strategies, namely, social distance and dominance of power.
 
Key words: Request strategies; questionnaire survey; main differences; influencing factors

1.    Introduction
Pragmatics as a subfield of linguistics mainly concerns the ways in which context contributes to meaning. It is a newly emerging subject and was acknowledged as an independent subject in the 1970s due to the publication of Journal of Pragmatics, a hallmark event. Since then, linguists at home and abroad have made substantial studies on pragmatics and have made some great achievements, such as speech act theory and the theory of conversational implicature.
With the development of pragmatics and the intensive studies on speech acts, request also receives more and more attention. Requests are face-threatening acts, acts that can be a threat to others’ face. However, as a specific speech act, request plays an important role in our daily life. Since face-threatening acts are inevitable in social communication, to reduce the damage caused by these kinds of acts to the minimum is the purpose of the study of speech acts. Requests, if not properly handled, will easily cause damage to both the speakers and the hearers.