The present research investigates the phenomena and causes of pragmatic fossilization of English majors,with request speech act being the research target and by adopting the extended discourse completion test.

The tenor of discourse, as the fundamental element involved in the speech act of request, gives an conventional requirement for both the addressers and the addressees that they need to know when expressing their requests for others who wouldn t feel "face-losing".

But till now, all the researches in this field tend to explain the characteristics of request strategies, mentioning little about the syntactic structure and ignoring the response which is an essential part of speech act of request.

A Cross-Cultural Contrastive Study on the Speech Act of Request in Chinese and English;

Although the basic structure of requests and the request sequence is a universal phenomenon, due to varied cultural values, languages differ in the actual realization of request strategies and modifications, which leads to different interactional styles.