{"title":"Mitigating strategies and politeness in German requests","authors":"Tanja Ackermann","doi":"10.1515/pr-2021-0034","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article empirically investigates possible politeness effects of different syntactic, morphosyntactic, and lexical mitigating strategies in German requests. In addition to the explicitness of the requestive utterance, internal and external modifiers as well as vocatives are considered. Based on the assumption that the weight of imposition has an influence on linguistic politeness, experimentally elicited production data for two requestive situations with a differing degree of imposition are compared regarding their formal properties. The data come from an online survey in which 578 native speakers of German (from Germany, Switzerland, and Austria) took part. The participants produced 1,006 requests. These were coded for several mitigating strategies and analyzed with a multifactorial analysis in order to identify the devices that are used in the high-imposition context and thus can be interpreted as conveying extra politeness. An important finding is that increased politeness is realized via devices beyond the head act strategy, namely morpho-syntactic and lexical tentativeness markers as well as multiple external modifiers.","PeriodicalId":45897,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Politeness Research-Language Behaviour Culture","volume":"19 1","pages":"355 - 389"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4000,"publicationDate":"2023-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Politeness Research-Language Behaviour Culture","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1515/pr-2021-0034","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
Abstract
Abstract This article empirically investigates possible politeness effects of different syntactic, morphosyntactic, and lexical mitigating strategies in German requests. In addition to the explicitness of the requestive utterance, internal and external modifiers as well as vocatives are considered. Based on the assumption that the weight of imposition has an influence on linguistic politeness, experimentally elicited production data for two requestive situations with a differing degree of imposition are compared regarding their formal properties. The data come from an online survey in which 578 native speakers of German (from Germany, Switzerland, and Austria) took part. The participants produced 1,006 requests. These were coded for several mitigating strategies and analyzed with a multifactorial analysis in order to identify the devices that are used in the high-imposition context and thus can be interpreted as conveying extra politeness. An important finding is that increased politeness is realized via devices beyond the head act strategy, namely morpho-syntactic and lexical tentativeness markers as well as multiple external modifiers.
期刊介绍：
The Journal of Politeness Research responds to the urgent need to provide an international forum for the discussion of all aspects of politeness as a complex linguistic and non-linguistic phenomenon. Politeness has interested researchers in fields of academic activity as diverse as business studies, foreign language teaching, developmental psychology, social psychology, sociolinguistics, linguistic pragmatics, social anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, communication studies, and gender studies. The journal provides an outlet through which researchers on politeness phenomena from these diverse fields of interest may publish their findings and where it will be possible to keep up to date with the wide range of research published in this expanding field.
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