Abstract
Request Strategies: A Comparative Study in Mandarin Chinese and Korean (2008) represents one of the first attempts to systematically compare request strategies between two East Asian languages. The study is also methodologically significant, using naturally occurring conversational data rather than relying on written questionnaires, and taking multiple-turn sequences rather than isolated individual sentences, as the scope of analysis. However, while the goal of the study is to reveal real patterns and strategies in natural talk-in-interaction, some parts of the analysis are based solely on role-playing data. Given that communicational motivations in artificial role-playing can hardly be considered to be ‘real,’ this review concludes that more analysis should be based on natural conversation to ensure authenticity in the discussion of request strategies.
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