自形成以来，跨文化语用学得到了迅速的发展。在欧美地区，跨文化语用学主要从跨文化语用学、跨文化社会语用学和语际语用学等方面进行研究，并取得了许多成果。例如，基南进行了对照分析语言情境在马达加斯加与会话合作原则1976，发现那里的人往往不遵循“量化指标”，“虽然他们所需的信息，他们经常给信息不听话者比要求”，因此，她提出了“搁置”准则。
Chapter One Introduction
Since the formation, the cross-cultural pragmatics has made a rapid development. In the West, cross-cultural pragmatics was studied in the aspects of cross-cultural pragmatic linguistics, cross-cultural social pragmatics and inter-language pragmatics, and there have been many achievements. For example, Keenan carried out a control analysis on the language situations in the Malagasy Republic with the conversation cooperative principle in 1976 and found that the people there often did not follow the "quantitative criterion", "Although they have the required information, they often give less information to the hearer than required,", accordingly, she raised "shelving criterion". In 1983, Leach analyzed the differences of importance of each criterion in politeness principle under different cultures. In 1993, Casper and Bloom - Mikulka also published a book entitled Cross-cultural Pragmatics. China began to pay attention to cross-cultural pragmatics in the 1980s and 1990s, there were a number of papers discussing the studies on cross-cultural pragmatics, covering cross-cultural pragmatics contrast, cross-cultural pragmatic competence, cross-cultural pragmatic adaptation, cross cultural pragmatic failure, cross-cultural pragmatic stipulation. There have been some works associated with cross-cultural pragmatics, such as Deng Yanchang and Liu Runqing’s Language and Culture (Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 1989), Wang Fuxiang’s Collected Contrastive Linguistics Papers (Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 1992), Wang Dexing’s English Discourse Analysis and Intercultural Communication (Beijing Language and Culture University Press, 1998), Hu Wenzhong, Lin Dajin, Jia Yuxin and other scholars have also published a book entitled Cross-cultural Communication.
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1.2 Research Questions
As indicated in the paper title, this study is to describe and explain the similarities and differences of request strategy in English and Chinese by comparisons based on actual surveys of Americans and Chinese. The choice of request act is mainly because it is widely used in various aspects of daily life, such as requesting others to pass the salt at dinner or requesting others to turn down the television when we sleep. From the studies of Lyons (1977), Searle (1979), Leech (1983), Searle & Vanderveken (1985) and Tsui (2000) on request act and our findings, it seems that we can make such a conclusion on request act: the speaker tries to get the hearer to do or stop doing something in communication, while the hearer is entitled to refuse or cooperate. It should be noted that request act is a future act, and should be within the hearer’s might. This definition can be fully confirmed in the most widely used habitually indirect request strategy. The
