RODNA KOMUNIKACIJA KAO VARIJANTA UČTIVOSTI

Abstract

There is an abundance of research on linguistic politeness which explore the influence of nonlinguistic, social factors such as gender on the formulation of politeness strategies. Having in mind various sociolinguistic studies (Maltz, Borker, 1982; Tannen, 1990; Troemel-Plotz, 1991; Gray, 1992; Johnson, 2000, DeVito, 2002; Wood, 1997; Basow, Rubenfeld, 2003) which claim there are male-female differences in linguistic behaviour and that women are more polite in communication than men, the aim of this paper is to investigate the extent to which a non-linguistic variable of gender affects the degree of directness and formulation of strategies used for realising the speech acts of request, favour asking and apology. The author of this paper thus endeavours to explore if the non-linguistic variable of gender affects the directness of politeness among the Serbian and the English native speakers, and if these speakers would change the degree od directness of the chosen strategy if they were to address a female instead of a male in the same context.   Linguistic corpora used for the research are gathered from the native speakers of Serbian and English language by means of a sociolinguistic questionnaire as a data elicitation technique. The said questionnaire consists of 18 socially-differentiated situations each of which describes the social context and the level of social power among the participants. The situations were designed so as to provide a context which may be expected to give rise to particular request/favour-asking/apology strategies. Since the questionnaire is of a semi-closed type, the respondents could choose among the offered responses or they could write down their own answer. The offered answers are in line with the Brown and Levinson’s (Brown, Levinson, 1987) taxonomy of politeness strategies, namely, the respondents were offered a direct strategy under a, positive politeness strategy under b, negative politeness strategy under c, and indirect strategy under d. They were also provided free space to write down their own answer in case their answer is none of the suggested. The author views the respondents’ answers not from the aspect of being more or less polite, but from the aspect of the (in)directness degree of the chosen strategy. For this reason, this study places politeness strategies on a directness scale where direct strategy is the first and most direct one and indirect strategy is the last and least direct one.    The respondents were first asked to choose a strategy they would use for addressing a man and then to state if they would change the selected strategy if they were to address a woman in the same situation. In case the answer was yes, they were asked to provide the strategy they would use in this case. Based on comparative quantitative and qualitative analysis of the collected data, conclusions were drawn onthe  differences in the degree of directness in a defined social context between male and female speakers and the influence of the said non-linguistic variable on the formulation of strategies in both speech communities. The comparative intergender analysis carried out in this study did not show any statistically significant difference in the degree of directness and formulation of strategy between male and female respondents, neither among Serbian nor among English speakers. The strategy both groups preferred on the level of all three speech acts was a mix of positive and negative politeness. In addition, the vast majority of speakers in both communities stated they would not change the degree of directness/strategy they chose for addressing a man if they were to address a woman in the same context.  The analysis carried out in this paper has recognised the importance of a social context and social factors in accordance with the postulates of the contemporary studies on gender and discourse. In addition to this, considering the fact that the third feminist wave argues for the analysis of linguistic behaviour of women on the level of communities of practice for the purpose of identifying intragender variation, the author of this paper thinks that further research should focus on specific communities of practice with the aim of identifying any intragender variations.