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/> 3.3.2 Studies of Lanzhou Dialect........25
Chapter Four Method........27
4.1 Research Questions and Hypotheses..............27
4.2 Participants...........28
4.3 Instrument............30
4.4 Design.........31
4.5 Procedures ............39
4.6 DataAnalysis........40
Chapter Five Results..........52
5.1 Overall Structure of Dunhuang and Lanzhou Service Staff’s Responses toRequests...........52
5.2 Effects of Gender Difference on Dunhuang and Lanzhou Service..........58
5.3 Effects of Age Difference on Dunhuang and Lanzhou Service ..........65
5.4 Comparison of Responses to Requests in Dunhuang and Lanzhou........72

Chapter Five Results

After the combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis, the researchacquired results to answer aforementioned research questions and test the hypotheses.This chapter presents the results with respect to the general analysis of responses torequests in Dunhuang and Lanzhou and effects of gender and age differences on them.

5.1 Overall Structure of Dunhuang and Lanzhou Service Staff’s Responses to Requests

As indicated above, the analysis of responses to requests was carried outaccording to the coding framework. Thus this part presents the results of the firstquestion with regard to the classifications of coding framework.In total there were 640 recordings of DH service staff in record. (see Table 5.1).According to Table 5.1, the use of feigned relative alerters appeared the leastfrequently (only 2 out of 640 recordings with a percentage of less than 1%). The tablealso indicated a frequency of 14 recordings for common alerters, and the percentagewas also small: 2.2%. Compared with the above two alerters, alerters of respectoccupied a much higher percentage of 17% with the frequencyof 109. Besides, a majoroccupation of no alerters with 515 recordings out of 640 and a percentage of 80.5% were observed as well.Greetings, as vital indicators of politeness, were also analyzed in the research.Asmentioned above, there existed only one kind of greeting: ni hao (hello).According toTable 5.1, most conversations did not observe the employment of greetings, with afrequency of 582 out of 640 and percentage of 90.9%.Head acts, presenting the main content of responses, were regarded as theminimum units to perform responses. Behavioral responses occupied about 11.4% oftotal head acts, with thefrequencyof73. Direct responses occupiedthe largest partwiththe percentage of 81.7%. Bycontrast, indirect responses turned up much less frequentlywith the percentage of 3.3%. In essence, backward requests were not doing a favor forcustomers, which took up 3.6% of all the head acts.The syntax and vocabulary of all recordings was distributed into threeclassifications. The employment of downgraders was observed with a percentage of17.3%. 111 recordings out of 640 conversations were found to use downgraders suchas “一下 (a bit)” and “如果可以的话 (if that is OK for you)”, etc. By contrast,upgraders were observed less frequently with a percentage of less than 1%. In general,recordings without any graders were most commonly observed, occupying 82.2% ofthe total.

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Conclusion

By a combination of qualitative and quantitative studies, this paper probed intothe effects of gender and age difference on the service staff’s requests responses