Mitigating strategies and politeness in German requests

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.