Lecture: Saving Face: Exploring Politeness in Requests Across Four Cultures

A Cross-Cultural Study on the Relation of Politeness and Indirectness in German vs. Inner-Circle Varieties of English

May I, Could I, Would you mind? – In which context is one form more polite than the other and how do speakers of different varieties and languages rate them in terms of politeness?
In interactions, speakers constantly negotiate and desperately try to uphold their perceived ‘face’ by employing strategies every day, yet the norms of what is considered polite can differ greatly between speakers of different cultures. In my Master’s thesis, I explored these gaps and tried to detect patterns within the relation between politeness and indirectness across German and English but also within the inner-circle varieties of British, American and Canadian English using quantitative methods.

Politeness permeates and sets rules for social action, especially in socially sensible contexts like requesting. Within this context, our current project, "The Art of Requesting", seeks to add to the extensive body of research. The project consists of multiple undergraduate and graduate theses researching a selection of head-act request strategies’ production and perception in terms of politeness and indirectness via an online questionnaire. My study follows Blum-Kulka's (1987) coding scheme and particularly focuses on cross-cultural and variational differences between German and English speakers as well as the three English varieties BrE, AmE and CanEng. Particularly CanEng discourse surrounds the extent of a presently remaining colonial British influence versus a possible outweighing American influence and thus provides an interesting perspective on dynamic influences within varieties. In this study, politeness in requests is seen as a performative act that is used to judge relationships between interactants. I aim at unveiling those underlying social norms. To achieve this, participants were asked to complete a modified version of the DCT, a DRT (Discourse Ranking Test) on politeness and indirectness in six selected scenarios.

Info

Day: 2024-11-22
Start time: 15:00
Duration: 00:30
Room: 00A23 CNMS
Track: Pragmatics
Language: en

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