Pragmatic Variation in Chinese Requests

Variational pragmatics focuses on the influence of geographical and social factors on intralingual variation.To date, it has mainly investigated the varieties of Indo-European pluricentric languages, for example, English, Spanish, German, and French.Few studies have examined the varieties of other pluricentric languages, such as Chinese and Arabic.This paper thus aims to explore the pragmatic strategies in Chinese requests across Mainland China and Taiwan.Data were collected from 120 university students (60 in each area) via Discourse Completion Tasks.The results showed the interactive effect of region and power on the employment of request strategies and external modifiers by the two regions.In addition, significant differences were observed in the employment of internal modifiers across the two regions.