Kuang Ching Hei

Requests : Voices of Malaysian children

Abstract 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 speakers 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.

GRICES MAXIMS IN HUMOUR: THE CASE OF HOME WITH KIDS

Sitcoms provide entertainment, one of which is through humour. Using Grice’s (1975) non-observance of Cooperative Principles – flouting, violating, infringing, opting out, and suspending as framework for analysis, this study aims to investigate whether the non-observance of Grice’s (1975) maxims can contribute to the humorous effects seen in the Chinese sitcom “Home with Kids (Season 4)”. Specifically, this study aims to detect which of the maxims play an important role in creating humour. Data were compiled from 96 episodes of the show. A comparison of the non-observance was made before findings were qualitatively presented. The findings revealed that flouting and violating were used most frequently to create humour. The outcome of this study will have beneficial effects for L2 learners of Mandarin by enabling them to comprehend Chinese humour. The implications derived from this study suggest that humour may be created differently due to cultural differences.

Empowering Self-disclosure: The Active Post-retiree Life Accounts of Malaysian and Singaporean Senior Citizens

The elderly have become a major issue in many countries today. Health, lifestyles, living conditions and family support are important considerations for the elderly. Many of their peers have passed on and the elderly tend to be lonely. Sociolinguists (e.g. Matsumoto 2005; Coupland et al. 1991) have shown that the elderly tend to reveal their lives to interlocutors. Whilst self-disclosure discourses might be seen as strategies of rapport building (Egan 1994: 138), Peterson (1999) wrote that elderly discourse is a way of sharing acts of ‘elderly heroism’. It is the elderly person’s way of telling a compassionate listener what they have been through, how much they have suffered and what they are now experiencing. Doing so enables them to achieve a sense of integrity and establish an intimate connection with the listener. Such discourse has been termed ‘Painful Self-Disclosure’ (henceforth, PSD), and Bonnesen and Hummert (2002) describe PSD as an elderly phenomenon. They mention that PSD can be disempowering to the elderly as such discourses emphasise the negative aspects of ageing. PSD is thus seen as negative discourse, and reflects the perils of ageing (Matsumoto 2005) since such talk reveals the narrator’s unhappy personal situation, such as ill health, immobility, sadness and also self-despair.