Requests across Varieties and Cultures

Requests have been successfully studied with the help of discourse completion tasks (DCTs) across a range of languages and communities. Starting with the CCSARP (Cross-cultural speech act realization project; cf. Blum-Kulka et al. 1989a), the study of request choices has brought to light contrasts between different languages (e.g. English, German, Hebrew, French, Russian, and many more; cf. e.g. Blum-Kulka et al. 1989a; Ogiermann 2009; Trosborg 1995) as well as cross-cultural contrasts between varieties of the same language (especially different varieties of English, cf. e.g. Barron 2008a/b; Flöck 2016). The form requests may take depends on what is considered polite in a society or community of speakers, which in turn depends on the prevailing power structures. Therefore, they are also particularly influenced by changes in a society, such as democratization. For the current study, we want to investigate the influence of processes of democratization on request formulation in different cultures. For this we looked at three different varieties of English (British, American, and Indian) as well as German (as spoken in Germany). Participants were of an older and a younger age group, to allow for an apparent time study design. Apparent time studies make use of synchronic data to study linguistic change, based on the assumption that the older speakers' usage will contain more instances of older, established variants, while younger speakers' usage will contain more instances of newer, incoming variants, thus allowing for the perception of recent change (cf. Tagliamonte 2011, 43). While wellestablished in sociolinguistics, the apparent-time approach has, to our knowledge, not been combined with contrastive and variational pragmatics before. The results from the DCTs will thus allow us to see not only differences in request behavior across languages and cultures, but also indicators of recent change. Furthermore, interviews were conducted with speakers of British English and German from two different age groups. These interviews are based on questions about the perception of social change and language change over the past few generations and might give a deeper understanding of the results gained from the DCTs. First, we will give an introduction to democratization and how it may affect language use, discuss our general approach, and then go into detail on previous findings of contrastive and variational pragmatic studies (section 2). Then, the method for this study will be discussed in more detail, namely how the DCTs are used and how the interviews were conducted (section 3). Section 4 will give insights into the results from the request elicitation as well as the results from the interviews. Section 5 will discuss these findings. Finally, in section 6, we will come to a conclusion and mention open questions awaiting further research, as well as describe our plan of future work in this area.