The variation of strategic politeness in indirect requests

Abstract

This study empirically examines the register effects of various politeness strategies in English requests. It is based on the premise that linguistic politeness is influenced by specific situational factors, such as the power difference between interlocutors or the degree of imposition of the request. To investigate this, the study compares experimental production data from a request scenario represented in 2 x 3 different experimental conditions, varying in three levels of imposition and two types of power relations between interlocutors. The data were collected through an online experiment with 207 native US English speakers. Next to the main production task, the experiment comprised several follow-up tasks designed to contrast the participants' request formulations with potential alternatives. The goal of the experiment was to identify common politeness strategies, and how they
vary across situational factors, as well as to detect motives for (dis)preferring alternative strategies. As key findings, we found out (i) that the variation of two types of politeness strategies – so-called conventional vs. non-conventional indirect requests – strongly correlate with the experimental conditions, and (ii) that potential choice motives strongly differ between these two types.