Do indirect requests communicate politeness?An experimental study of conventionalized indirect requests in French email communication

Abstract

This article addresses the relationship between linguistic politeness and addressee status in the performance of written requests in French. According to a first view, conventionalized Can you followed by a verbal phrase (in short, Can you VP?) “indirect requests” (IRs) are preferred because they enable speakers to convey politeness effects absent in imperatives. According to an alternative view, Can you VP? is the standard polite request form in written communication because it avoids impoliteness implications. To test these two competing hypotheses, I carried out a production task experiment with 122 native speakers of Belgian French writing email requests. In this experiment, addressee status was manipulated. An important finding is that higher addressee status does not increase the frequency of Can you VP? requests. Instead of using Can you VP? more often when they address higher status people, the participants used specific politeness markers such as formal greetings and the V-form of address. These results disconfirm the hypothesis that Can you VP? is used to convey extra politeness effects and suggests instead that people use such IRs to avoid the risk of being considered impolite.

Estrategias de cortesía verbal en anuncios de parejas publicados en un semanario ecuatoriano

“…Así: "favor enviar foto" o solo "enviar foto" -en lugar de "por favor, envíenme una foto". Como lo han señalado otros estudios (Ruytenbeek, 2020), la cortesía se refuerza precisamente con el empleo de las fórmulas señaladas, pero no se emplea una de las estrategias más comunes en otros contextos comunicativos -la petición indirecta en forma de pregunta-. A pesar de que esta estrategia también se use en la lengua escrita, al parecer el género discursivo del anuncio de pareja no se presta a su uso.…”

Saying “no” in emails in Mandarin Chinese and Australian English

“…In the last decades, a growing number of studies have investigated speech acts in email communication. However, as Liu and Ren (2016) observed, the majority of these studies focused on the speech act of requests (e.g., Chejnová 2014;Merrison et al 2012;Ruytenbeek 2020;Soler 2013), among which a few examined email requests by Chinese learners of English, including Chang and Hsu (1998), C. Chen (2001), Y. Chen (2015) and Li (2018).…”

“…Chen 2015;Lapp 2000). In the last decade, an increasing number of studies have examined emails from the perspective of pragmatics, which, however, predominantly focused on the speech act of requests (Chejnová 2014;Merrison et al 2012;Ruytenbeek 2020;Soler 2013). Although refusal is a speech act that people often make in email communication, which occurs when an email request or invitation cannot be complied with, there has been little research on email refusals.…”

Lexical and morpho-syntactic modification of student requests: An empirical contribution to the study of (im)politeness in French e-mail speech acts

“…One exception is Ruytenbeek (2020), who investigated the politeness of Pouvez-vous VP ? in French e-mail requests in relation with sender-recipient social status asymmetry.…”