In addition, the social distance and the relative power can be the factors of the imposition, for example, the speaker and hearer
’s roles in the society can be one
factor in the rank of imposing someone’s face wants. Nikula 1996, in Soler and Jorda, 2007 proposes five types of
contextual information that may affect the appropriate use of peripheral modification devices. They are in the following.
a.
Power: those who have more power can express themselves without
employing modifiers for example, boss-employee. b.
Social distance: those who are strangers will tend to use more modifiers.
c.
Ranking of imposition: how demanding the request is implies that more or
less modification will be used. d.
Type of interaction: whether the interaction is for transactional or
interactional purposes will have an impact on the use of peripheral modification devices.
e.
Type of speech act: the more the speech act is face-threatening, the more
modifying devices are needed.
7. Related Studies
There have been studies focusing on the same field that is about request strategies as in the following.
Hassall 2012 studied how Australian learners in a foreign language setting modify their requests in Bahasa Indonesia in everyday situations. His study
revealed how the Australian leaners differ from the native speakers of Bahasa Indonesia in using requests, and he figured out that most native speakers of Bahasa
Indonesia used internal modifications very often while the Australian learners lack use of internal modifications. However both the Bahasa Indonesia native speakers
and the Australian learners use query modification quite often. Konakahara 2011 studied the request realization strategies in English
textbooks for Japanese secondary level students, and discovered that the books had
lack of request strategies and that the interlocutors in the books represent a ‘can do’
society where requests are easy to make, yet actually requests are not always easy to make, and really depend on urgency, intimacy etc.
B. Conceptual Framework
This study focusing the analysis of request on request strategies available in dialogues where requests are made in all the textbooks employing a
taxonomy derived from Blum Kulka, House, and Kasper ’s 1989 categorization,
and a taxonomy of peripheral elements by Soler, Flor and Jorda 2005 for the purpose of the present study, and analyzing the contextual information available in
the dialogues using Brown and Levinson’s 1987. Since this study also accounts for the pedagogical purposes in textbooks
for language learning due to the data of the present study taken from English textbooks, the taxonomy for analyzing the request strategies derived from Blum
Kulka, House, and Kasper 1989 and Soler, Flor and Jorda 2005 are, therefore, not taken entirely. Consequently, it will result in the modification of the
categorization from the two experts to fit the need of the analysis of the present study.
