| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 語言學研究所 === 85 === Abstract
The purpose of this study is to examine the sequential
organization of the requests in Mandarin discourse from a
functional perspective. According to Levinson (1983) and
Schegloff (1990), the structure of requests in English
conversation may be organized in the order of position 1 (Pre-
requests, P1) followed by position 2 (go-ahead response, P2),
position 3 (the request, P3) and position 4 (compliance, P4).
Four research questions are of particular interest and are
addressed in the present study: (1) Do Mandarin requests in
spoken and written language also show the sequential
organization? (2) Is the sequential organization functionally
motivated? (3) How does the theory of politeness as advanced in
Brown & Levinson (1987) account for the sequential organization
of the requests? (4) How do we interpret indirect requests based
on the sequential organization? Our findings indicate that
both spoken and written requests are sequentially organized in
the order of 1234, 134, 124, 13, and 34. etc., despite of the
distinct language medium (spoken vs. written). Also,
investigation into recurrent linguistic features , following
Biber's similar study (1988), of the four positions reveals that
the sequential organization is functionally motivated by
interactionality instead of language medium or plannedness.
In terms of politeness, it is found that politeness strategies
proposed by Brown and Levinson apply to the sequential
organization of requests as a whole, indicating that the theory
of politeness extends its effect on face-threatening requests
from the fragmented positions (turns/lines) to the
organizational level.
Finally, the sequential organization as an internalized schema
contributes to the interpretation of indirect requests. To
decode indirect requests, participants have to rely on the
Cooperative Principle (Grice, 1975) and typical linguistic
features associated with requests so that they may activate the
requestive schema and interact with each other based on the
schematic sequencing from either P1 or P3 to the final
compliance, P4.
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