Preference Organization and Cross-Cultural Variation in Request Responses: A Corpus-Based Comparison of British and American English

Abstract

This study compares request responses in two national varieties of English, American English (AmE) and British English. The responses are manually retrieved from two corpora of English, the British component to the International Corpus of English and the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English and analyzed both for their function and format. It is shown that request responses in both varieties pattern as preference structure would predict: compliant responses occur more frequently than non-compliant ones and can thus be understood as the preferred response type to requestive first pair parts. The analysis of co-occurrence patterns of first and second pair parts reveals that the directness level of the first pair part does not significantly influence the response type of the second pair part. It does, however, have an impact on the level of explicitness of the response. While cross-cultural differences in request responses are generally rare in the present database, they do surface in the higher numbers for implicit compliance in the AmE corpus. These results show the importance of a cross-cultural approach to the study of naturally occurring request responses retrieved from corpora of authentic speech.

Society, Culture and the Speech Act of Praise – Observations from Ugandan English vis-à-vis British English

“…Finally, following Flöck and Geluykens (2018) and Ronan (2015), we complemented the previous procedures with a manual search of our corpus.…”