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Kuang Ching Hei, Maya Khemlani David, Zuraidah Mohd Don
Requests: Voices of Malaysian children
To make a request is to express a desire for the addressee to do something, and because it bears a requirement to be complied with, a request is usually best achieved when performed with tact and politeness. Bach and Harnish (1984: 48) define the term request as ‘a speech act expressing the speaker's desire for the hearer to do something with the added proviso that the hearer takes this expressed desire as the reason to act’. This paper examines the many varied forms that this speech act takes in the speech of five young Malaysian children who generally use the English language to communicate with their mother. The data shows the creativity of young children for whom English is a second language in that there are many ways of making a request. Although the forms vary, the function is constant, i. e. asking for something. The various strategies used by the children, the variety of English, i. e. Malaysian English, and the use of code switching in the data will also be described.
Multilingua Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication, Walter de Gruyter
Print ISSN: 0167-8507
Volume: 25, 05/2006
Pages: 27 - 42