Request Strategies in Contemporary Chinese Teledramas—A Corpus-based Study

Abstract

This study was designed to explore the issue of request strategies in the Chinese setting by establishing a corpus of vedio clips of contemporary Chinese teledramas on the basis of an overview of previous studies on Chinese request strategies. In the present study, we chose 3970 short sequences of video clips from 35 Chinese teledramas which vividly describe the Chinese people’s life in the contemporary times. Taking the two variables of power and distance as reference points, nine situations were designed in this study. Elaborate request strategies were expected to be consecutively elicited in the nine situations of the 35 contemporary Chinese teledrama serials from the perspectives of social power and social distance in the section. It offered a new research method and idea for the future speech acts research.