Face Saving Strategies of Requests in a Movie Text

The previous studies on requests are mostly based on Discourse Completion Test and Assessment Test. In this paper we attempt to show DCT is not sufficient for the request studies even though it has its significance in interlanguage studies and suggest that DCT should be modified by data analysis from real data. We apply Brown and Levinson’s face threatening weightiness formula, Blum-Kulka’s request strategies and Koo’s politeness modifiers and their scoring system to the data from a movie ‘Stepmom’ and examine if they are fit for the real data. The findings show that the social distance between the speaker and the hearer is not absolute, objective distance but the speaker’s subjective feeling of the distance over the hearer and the most important factor in the social distance is the affection and the social distance changes when the affection changes. The study also shows that the most polite strategies are used to the group of people who are in the middle, neither close nor far, in the social distance.