Mitigating strategies and politeness in German requests

IF 1.4 2区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Journal of Politeness Research-Language Behaviour Culture Pub Date : 2023-03-24 DOI:10.1515/pr-2021-0034

Tanja Ackermann

{"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.

查看原文本刊更多论文

德语请求中的缓和策略与礼貌

摘要本文实证研究了不同句法、形态句法和词汇缓和策略在德语请求中可能产生的礼貌效应。除了请求语的明确性外，还考虑了内修饰语和外修饰语以及动词性。在假定强加分量对语言礼貌有影响的基础上，比较了两种不同强加分量的请求情景的生成数据的形式性质。这些数据来自一项在线调查，578名以德语为母语的人(来自德国、瑞士和奥地利)参与了这项调查。参与者提出了1006个请求。这些被编码为几种缓解策略，并通过多因素分析进行分析，以确定在高强制环境中使用的设备，从而可以被解释为传达额外的礼貌。一个重要的发现是，礼貌的增加是通过头部行为策略之外的手段实现的，即形态句法和词汇试探性标记以及多种外部修饰语。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

求助全文

约1分钟内获得全文求助全文

来源期刊

Journal of Politeness Research-Language Behaviour Culture Multiple-

CiteScore

2.50

自引率

30.00%

发文量

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.