Exploring the Speech Act of Requests in English, German, and Hungarian

Abstract

My thesis is about the speech act of request and its realization in English, German, and Hungarian. The topic of the thesis involves indirect speech acts, performatives and constatives, politeness, head act strategies and modification strategies. Additionally, the role of speech acts is also discussed within the framework of second language acquisition. I introduce some early experiments regarding the speech act of requests. For this purpose, I constructed a DCT based questionnaire to investigate the head act and modification strategies in English, German, and Hungarian.