Centre for Language, Discourse & Communication

This paper provides some (more) insights into cross-cultural variation in speech act realization by analyzing English, German, Polish and Russian requests. It aims to show that the relationship between indirectness and politeness is interpreted differently across cultures. Hence, the analysis focuses on the difference between direct requests, which have been said to play a central role in Polish and Russian, and conventionally indirect requests, which are the most frequent request type in English and German. It further shows that the examined languages exhibit culture-specific preferences for syntactic and lexical downgraders modifying the illocutionary force of the request and, thus, reducing the threat to the hearer's face.

The requests analyzed in this study have been elicited by means of a discourse completion task and constitute responses to a scenario frequently used in previous request studies, so that the results can be compared with those established for other languages. The strong agreement among languages on the use of conventional indirectness in this scenario allows for testing the restricted applicability of interrogative constructions claimed for the two Slavic languages.

The present paper analyzes the influence of gender and culture on speech act performance. Although culture as a factor shaping gender roles can be regarded as being implicitly addressed by the growing number of speech act studies analyzing gender differences in various languages, results from such studies are difficult to compare. This study examines responses to offensive situations produced under identical contextual conditions by English and Russian women and men, thus ensuring comparability across groups and allowing for statements on the culture-specificity of linguistic gender differences. The first part of the paper offers a contrastive analysis of English and Russian responses to offensive situations, sketching some culture-specific differences in dealing with them. The second part is devoted to an investigation of gender-based differences in English and Russian, their comparison and interpretation. Apart from apology strategies and intensifying devices, the study also examines the use of downgrading strategies and the effect of strategy combinations on the illocutionary force of the responses.

The present study analyses bilingual conversations taking place in binational families living in the UK. The focus is on two Polish/English stepfamilies, where the Polish mothers’ concern with preserving and developing their children’s linguistic and cultural identity collides with the English partner’s limited knowledge of Polish. While the paper takes a CA approach to bilingual conversation (Auer 1984; Li 1994), it shows that even when language choice is rational and participant- rather than discourse-related, it can have a crucial impact on the discourse identities of the participants in the interaction. The application of Goffman’s participation framework (1981) to the analysis of the data makes it possible to investigate different functions of and motivations for language choice and their impact on the participation status of the English participants – as well as their identity.

The present study demonstrates that language-specific grammatical resources can afford speakers language-specific ways of organizing cooperative practical action. On the basis of video recordings of Polish families in their homes, we describe action affordances of the Polish impersonal modal declarative construction trzeba x (“one needs to x”) in the accomplishment of everyday domestic activities, such as cutting bread, bringing recalcitrant children back to the dinner table, or making phone calls. Trzeba-x turns in first position are regularly chosen by speakers to point to a possible action as an evident necessity for the furthering of some broader ongoing activity. Such turns in first position provide an environment in which recipients can enact shared responsibility by actively involving themselves in the relevant action. Treating the necessity as not restricted to any particular subject, aligning responsive actions are oriented to when the relevant action will be done, not whether it will be done. We show that such sequences are absent from English interactions by analyzing (a) grammatically similar turn formats in English interaction (“we need to x,” “the x needs to y”), and (b) similar interactive environments in English interactions. We discuss the potential of this research to point to a new avenue for researchers interested in the relationship between language diversity and diversity in human action and cognition.

We compare the use of two formats for requesting an object in informal everyday interaction: imperatives, common in our Polish data, and second-person polar questions, common in our English data. Imperatives and polar questions are selected in the same interactional “home environments” across the languages, in which they enact two social actions: drawing on shared responsibility and enlisting assistance, respectively. Speakers across the languages differ in their choice of request format in “mixed” interactional environments that support either. The findings shed light on the orderly ways in which cultural diversity is grounded in invariants of action formation.[Supplementary materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Research on Language and Social Interaction for the following free supplemental resource(s): subtitled video clips of the analysed object request sequences.]

This paper engages with the concept of off-record requests (Brown and Levinson, 1987), often referred to as hints and viewed as a form of implicature in politeness research. It analyses three fragments of data featuring the transfer of objects in video-recorded interactions taking place in Polish families. In all these sequences the object transfer is initiated through hint-like utterances asking about the availability or location of the required object.
The paper argues that off-record requests are exceedingly difficult to identify in ongoing interaction: the present data show that even though the analysed ‘hints’ are highly transparent in the contexts in which they are produced, there is no conclusive evidence that they are intended as requests or even interpreted as such by the person providing the object. The analysed examples also show, on the one hand, that ‘hints’ can function as a form of communicative abbreviation (Ervin-Tripp, 1976) and, on the other, that they can represent an idea evolving over several turns as the interlocutors jointly accomplish a task.
While most research to date has focused on the different forms requests take and the amount of politeness they express, viewing them in their sequential environments illustrates that politeness is not so much about how we formulate our needs and involve others in satisfying them, but how we attend to others’ needs.

When English nouns are borrowed into German, they need to be assigned grammatical gender. Since grammatical gender information is not present in English, the integration of anglicisms in German offers the opportunity to investigate regularities of gender assignment.
Furthermore, it can be expected that the integration of loanwords can cause some variation in the usage of grammatical gender, as has been observed impressionistically for different varieties of German in previous research. This article picks up on both of these issues and first of all discusses “gender assignment schemas” for English loans based on established patterns of gender assignment in German. Secondly, an empirical study investigates gender variation across three major German dialect areas. The findings show a substantial amount of variation among many of the test items. These results are discussed in relation to cognitive schemas of gender assignment and in terms of regional variation.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how teachers understand
the role of affects and emotions in manifestations of the nation and
nationalism in schools. In particular, the paper examines how teachers’
political orientations – conservative or progressive – are
entangled with their understandings of ‘affective nationalism.’ To
do so, the authors use data from an exploratory qualitative study
with 21 Greek-Cypriot primary and secondary school teachers, who
were interviewed about their understandings of nationalism, affect
and school practices in the context of ethnically divided Cyprus. The
longstanding Cyprus conflict fuels intense national feelings that are
manifested in school commemorations, practices, and policies,
hence the study explores the extent to which teachers understand
these manifestations as affective nationalism. The findings show
that teachers’ political orientations are intertwined with how teachers
view and evaluate nationalism and its affective dimensions.
The analysis provides insights into the different pedagogical and
political visions that compete at the intersections of affect, nation,
and nationalism in schools.