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Politeness and in-directness across cultures:
A comparison of English, German, Polish
and Russian requests
EVA OGIERMANN
Abstract
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 shows that the relationship between indirectness and
politeness is interpreted differently across cultures. Hence, the analysis fo-
cuses on the difference between direct requests, which have been said to
play a central role in Polish and Russian, and conventionally indirect re-
quests, which are the most frequent request type in English and German. It
further shows that the examined languages exhibit culture-specific prefer-
ences 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 lan-
guages on the use of conventional indirectness in this scenario allows for
testing the restricted applicability of interrogative constructions claimed
for the two Slavic languages.
Keywords: requests, indirectness, politeness, English, German, Polish, Russian
1. Introduction
1.1. Politeness in cross-cultural research
Recent work on politeness focuses on its “chameleon-like” character
(Watts 2003) and the ways in which it is negotiated in discourse in par-
ticular communities of practice (Mills 2003). Another central aspect of
these so-called post-modern politeness theories is the criticism of previ-
ous work on politeness, in particular Brown and Levinson’s speech act
Journal of Politeness Research 5 (2009), 189⫺216 1612-5681/09/005⫺0189
DOI 10.1515/JPLR.2009.011
쑕
Walter de Gruyter
190 Eva Ogiermann
based approach (1987). While it is certainly true that politeness does not
reside within linguistic structures, every language has at its disposal a
range of culture-specific routine formulae which carry “politeness de-
fault values” (Escandell-Vidal 1996: 643).
The culture-specific meanings and politeness functions conventionally
associated with certain expressions and grammatical constructions in a
given language become apparent through comparison with other lan-
guages. At the same time, approaching politeness contrastively makes it
necessary to establish categories which can be compared across groups.
While post-modern theorists shift the focus towards the investigation
of how people disagree on what constitutes politeness, cross-cultural re-
search aims to establish how they agree on what is polite ⫺ and how they
do so differently in different cultures. Not only is the mutual knowledge
necessary to infer an implicature (Grice 1975) culture-specific but cul-
tural values also determine whether it may be more appropriate to flout
conversational maxims or to abide by the rules of the cooperative prin-
ciple in a particular situation.
Although post-modern theorists devote ample attention to the discus-
sion of Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, the vast amount of em-
pirical research inspired by their framework is usually left unmentioned.
Studies examining various speech acts in many different languages have
provided valuable insights into culture-specific features of politeness and
the difficulties foreign language learners experience in recognizing and
adhering to the politeness norms of the target language.
The speech act of requesting has proved particularly popular in both
theoretical and empirical work on politeness. Requests are central to
Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory and the most frequently studied
speech act in cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics. Their social
function consists in getting the hearer to do something for the speaker
(Searle 1969: 66), which makes them beneficial to the latter and costly
to the former. Since requests threaten the hearer’s negative face by re-
stricting her or his freedom of action (Brown and Levinson 1987), in
order to assure the hearer’s compliance with a request, it is necessary to
formulate it in a socially and culturally appropriate way.
Although Brown and Levinson describe the social implications of
speech acts and the strategies available for performing them as universal,
empirical research has shown that the pragmatic force of syntactically
and semantically equivalent utterances differs across languages. Re-
search conducted in the field of cross-cultural pragmatics illustrates cul-
ture-specific preferences in realizing requests (e. g., House and Kasper
1981; Blum-Kulka 1987, 1989; Blum-Kulka and House 1989; House
1989; Sifianou 1992; Fukushima 1996, 2000; Van Mulken 1996; Lubecka
2000; Ma
´
rquez Reiter 2000, 2002; Byon 2004, 2006; Barron 2008), while
Requests across cultures 191
interlanguage studies provide evidence for the difficulties second and
foreign language learners with various L1s experience in bringing across
the intended illocutionary force of a request (e. g., Trosborg 1995; Bar-
ron 2003; Cenoz 2003; Hassall 2003; Schauer 2004, 2007; Warga 2004,
2007; Marti 2006; Fe
´
lix-Brasdefer 2007; Ogiermann 2007; Eslami and
Noora 2008; Hendriks 2008; Otcu and Zeyrek 2008; Woodfield 2008).
Although the number of studied languages is steadily growing, English
and German being particularly popular, little is known about the cul-
ture-specificity of Polish and Russian requests. This is not only because
these languages have received less attention than Western European lan-
guages, but also because most of the literature on Polish and Russian
speech acts has been written in languages other than English. Hence,
one of the objectives of the present paper is to provide an insight into
the research conducted by Polish, Russian and German linguists.
1.2. Politeness and indirectness: Theory and practice
Pragmatic politeness theories (e. g., Leech 1983; and Brown and Levin-
son 1987) assume a correlation between indirectness and politeness, and
most empirical work centres on issues of indirectness. According to
Leech, indirectness implies optionality for the hearer, and the degree of
politeness can be increased “by using a more and more indirect kind of
illocution” (1983: 108). In Brown and Levinson’s theory, in contrast, the
correlation between indirectness and politeness largely stems from view-
ing politeness as deviant from Grice’s Cooperative Principle (1975). They
distinguish between three main levels of directness in performing a face-
threatening act: Off-record strategies explicitly flout Grice’s conversa-
tional maxims and focus on face-redress, while on-record strategies com-
bined with redressive action have the advantage of being clear and polite
at the same time (Brown and Levinson 1987: 72). Bald on-record strate-
gies, in contrast, focus on clarity and efficiency, conform to Grice’s max-
ims, and pay no attention to face (1987: 95).
Although these levels of directness have been described as universal
and have been attested in all the languages studied so far, equating indi-
rectness with politeness and viewing pragmatic clarity and directness as
lack of concern for the hearer’s face is an interpretation reflecting Anglo-
Saxon cultural values.
What Brown and Levinson’s theory does not account for is that some
cultures appreciate pragmatic clarity while associating directness with
honesty. Indirect requests, on the other hand, not only increase “the
interpretive demands on the hearer” (Blum-Kulka 1987: 133), but can
also “make the speaker sound devious and manipulative” (Pinker 2007:
442). This interpretation of indirectness dominates research on the Rus-
192 Eva Ogiermann
sian concept of politeness, which has been shown to rely on directness
and frankness rather than on the avoidance of face-loss (Rathmayr
1994: 271).
A high degree of indirectness has been portrayed as a waste of the
hearer’s time (Zemskaja 1997: 297), and refusal to “join the speaker’s
manipulative game” has been discussed as a factor leading to communi-
cative failure (Ermakova and Zemskaja 1993: 52). It has further been
argued that a Russian hearer does not necessarily regard a request as an
imposition on her or his personal freedom, and a potential refusal in-
volves less face-loss for a Russian speaker than it does for somebody
with an Anglo-Saxon cultural background (Rathmayr 1994: 274).
However, despite its over-emphasis on the hearer’s autonomy, Brown
and Levinson’s theory does acknowledge that all speakers have a nega-
tive and a positive face and that verbal interaction tends to affect both
the hearer’s and the speaker’s face. Off-record strategies, for instance,
not only satisfy the hearer’s negative face to a greater degree than nega-
tive politeness but also allow the speaker to “avoid the inescapable ac-
countability, the responsibility for his action that on-record strategies
entail” (Brown and Levinson 1987: 73).
As analyses of request sequences evolving over several conversational
turns have shown, off-record strategies often take the form of pre-re-
quests. Pre-requests are face-saving to the speaker as they help avoid the
face-loss inherent in a refusal (Levinson 1983: 357⫺358). The possibility
of obtaining the desired object without explicitly asking for it has led
some researchers to suggest that requests are dispreferred actions, their
preferred variant being an offer (Schegloff 1990: 63) or compliance with
the pre-request (Levinson 1983: 361). Complying with a non-overt re-
quest can be viewed as more polite than making an offer, since an offer
makes the propositional content disguised by the off-record pre-request
explicit.
Off-record request strategies offer an ‘out’ for both: the hearer, who may
refuse to comply with the request by simply ignoring the hint, and the
speaker, who can continue the conversation as if no request had been issued
without incurring the face-loss involved in one’s request being ignored.
While speakers who associate indirectness with politeness are likely to
perceive off-record requests as strategies focusing on the hearer’s nega-
tive face, those preferring a more direct conversational style may view
the evasive approach underlying off-record requests as benefiting the
speaker’s face and even as increasing the imposition on the hearer’s face.
The reluctance to clearly formulate one’s wishes may be interpreted as
an attempt to save one’s own face while putting the hearer in a position
where she or he has to take the initiative for the speaker’s wishes to be
fulfilled. The increased degree of optionality is illusive since once the
Requests across cultures 193
slightest hint is dropped, the hearer feels compelled to take it up and
offer what the speaker is too reluctant to ask for. Ignoring such a hint
would be impolite, therefore, an indirect request may put more pressure
on the hearer than would a straightforward one.
1.3. Request strategies and levels of directness
Empirical research generally supports the broad distinction between
three main levels of directness suggested by Brown and Levinson (1987)
by differentiating between direct, conventionally indirect and non-con-
ventionally indirect requests. While most studies adhere to the frame-
work developed in the CCSARP (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989), where nine
different substrategies are suggested, some researchers arrive at as many
as 18 different request types (Aijmer 1996: 132⫺133), which illustrates
the complexity of this speech act.
Although the strategies have been placed on a scale of increasing indi-
rectness (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989: 18), indirectness and politeness do not
necessarily constitute parallel dimensions. Speakers of several languages,
including English, have been shown to perceive conventionally indirect
requests as most polite (e. g., Blum-Kulka 1987: 131). The most frequent
realization at this level of directness is the so called query preparatory,
which refers to the ability or willingness to perform the speech act (Blum-
Kulka et al. 1989: 18) and mostly takes the form of an interrogative
construction containing the modal verb can (see Searle 1975).
While English and German show a strong preference for conventional
indirectness, literature available on Polish and Russian requests assigns
a more central role to direct requests, especially those taking the form
of imperative constructions. The little that is known about Polish and
Russian requests in the field of cross-cultural pragmatics mainly goes
back to Wierzbicka’s writings (e. g., 1985, 1991 and 1992). Since her main
aim is to illustrate an Anglo-Saxon bias in politeness research, she em-
phasizes the role of the imperative in performing Polish and Russian
requests, while pointing out the softening effect of the diminutive on its
illocutionary force and the restricted applicability of interrogative con-
structions.
Although imperative constructions are more likely to be interpreted
as polite requests in Polish (Marcjanik 1997; Lubecka 2000) and Russian
(Mills 1992; Rathmayr 1994; Berger 1997; Larina 2003) than in English,
describing requests as speech acts in which “the diminutive and the im-
perative work hand in hand” (Wierzbicka 1991: 51) does not do justice
to the complexity of this speech act either in Polish or in Russian.
Marcjanik maintains that although imperatives are mainly associated
with orders in Polish, they can also serve as polite requests (1997: 159),
194 Eva Ogiermann
in particular if their illocutionary force is softened, e. g., through intona-
tion, the addition of address forms, personal pronouns or modal par-
ticles (1997: 160).
Researchers analyzing Russian requests not only agree that the im-
perative is the most frequent and appropriate strategy for performing
requests in Russian (Rathmayr 1994; Berger 1997; Brehmer 2000; Betsch
2003; Larina 2003), but also point out the complex nature of its many
forms and functions. Rathmayr, for instance, discusses pragmatic differ-
ences between perfective and imperfective imperatives (1994: 252), while
Benacchio (2002) suggests a correlation between negative politeness and
perfective imperatives and positive politeness and imperfective impera-
tives, respectively.
Interrogative constructions, such as ability questions, are regarded as
hyper-polite (Mills 1992: 68), and their use in daily communication is
said to be heavily restricted (Rathmayr 1994: 271). However, Mills shows
that Russian offers numerous possibilities for realizing conventionally
indirect requests and even goes as far as to claim that Russian provides
the speaker with “a richer combinatory variety by which to formulate
his indirection” (1992: 76) than does English.
Similarly, in her chapter on Polish requests, Marcjanik discusses
twelve different types of interrogative constructions (1997: 161⫺170) and
argues that conventionally indirect strategies constitute the most fre-
quent request type in Polish (1997: 175). Lubecka’s (2000) contrastive
analysis of Polish and English requests shows that imperatives are more
frequent in Polish than they are in English, but interrogative construc-
tions form the largest group of request strategies in both languages in
her data. Interestingly, Lubecka analyses requests along with invitations
and provides figures for a category containing both speech acts. Since
invitations, being beneficial to hearer, are generally more direct than
requests, this increases the amount of imperative constructions in her
data.
On the whole, the above cited studies suggest that although Polish and
Russian rely on the imperative to a greater degree than does English,
they both offer a wide range of conventionally indirect request strategies.
While in Russian, these strategies are associated with a high level of
formality, in Polish, they are said to constitute the most common re-
quest strategy.
2. Data collection
2.1. Method
While most speech act studies conducted in Western Europe are based
on empirical data, Polish and Russian linguists tend to rely on examples
Requests across cultures 195
from literature and the press, their own observations and intuitions, or
the intuitions of native speaker informants (e. g., Wierzbicka 1985; Mills
1991, 1992; Marcjanik 1997). Russian requests have also been studied
on the basis of linguistic corpora (e. g., Berger 1997; Brehmer 2000;
Betsch 2003).
The present analysis is based on data elicited by means of a written
discourse completion test (DCT). Despite the criticism DCT data have
received for not adequately rendering authentic speech, this method is
valued for its administrative advantages (Billmyer and Varghese 2000:
517) and has proved particularly useful for the study of politeness phe-
nomena in cross-cultural and interlanguage contexts. The DCT is the
only data collection technique yielding large amounts of fully compar-
able data in an unlimited number of languages, allowing for making
generalizations about what is typical and acceptable in a particular cul-
ture and comparing politeness norms across cultures.
Even if DCT responses constitute idealized and normative data, they
reliably illustrate the pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic norms of the
respondent’s culture (Beebe and Cummings 1996: 75; and Kasper 2000:
329) and provide valuable pragmatic input that can help the foreign
language learner “approach the norms for the given L2 speech com-
munity” (Cohen 2006: 359).
2.2. The DCT
The DCT with which the data for the present study were collected con-
sists of ten scenarios designed to elicit apologies, requests and com-
plaints. To ensure comparability, situations from everyday and academic
life were chosen. In choosing the scenarios native speakers of all four
languages were consulted. The probability for the scenarios to happen
and their possible interpretations and reactions to them were discussed.
The DCT was formulated in English and then translated into the three
other languages, though the translation process was greatly facilitated
by the fact that the scenarios had already been formulated while discuss-
ing them with native speakers in their languages.
2.3. Request scenario
The data analyzed in this study consist of responses to a scenario in
which a student falls ill, misses a lecture and rings up a fellow student
to ask if she or he can borrow his notes. The relationship between the
interlocutors in the scenario is characterized by low social distance and
equal social power, suggesting that the situation is not particularly face-
threatening and does not afford a high degree of indirectness.
196 Eva Ogiermann
Since scenarios featuring requests for notes have frequently been used
in previous research, the results of my study can be compared with those
established for other languages, such as British English (Faerch and
Kasper 1989; House 1989; Woodfield 2008), Irish English (Barron 2003,
2008), American English (Blum-Kulka and House 1989; Rose 1992),
Australian English (Blum-Kulka 1989), German (Faerch and Kasper
1989; House 1989; Barron 2003), Dutch (Hendriks 2008), Danish
(Faerch and Kasper 1989), Turkish (Marti 2006; Otcu and Zeyrek 2008),
Canadian French (Blum-Kulka 1989; Blum-Kulka and House 1989), He-
brew (Blum-Kulka 1989; Blum-Kulka and House 1989), Argentinean
Spanish (Blum-Kulka 1989; Blum-Kulka and House 1989), Mexican
Spanish (Fe
´
lix-Brasdefer 2005), Korean (Byon 2004), Japanese (Rose
and Ono 1995), Chinese (Lin 2009 forthcoming) and many more.
An assessment study, in which German, Hebrew and Argentinean in-
formants estimated the contextual factors underlying this scenario on a
scale ranging from 1 to 3 (Blum-Kulka and House 1989: 142), shows
that the right to issue the request and the estimated likelihood of compli-
ance with the request tends to be rated high (2.80 and 2.64, respectively).
The assessment of the obligation to carry out the request, in contrast,
has resulted in an average value of 1.74.
According to previous studies (see above), respondents with different
cultural backgrounds show a strong agreement in using conventionally
indirect, mostly query preparatory strategies, in response to this sce-
nario. These results offer an opportunity to test the restrictions on the
use of interrogative constructions and the broader applicability of the
imperative suggested for Russian and Polish.
2.4. Population
The present study examines requests elicited from British, German, Po-
lish and Russian university students. The English data were collected at
universities in London, Cardiff and Swansea, the German data at the
University of Oldenburg, the Polish version of the DCT was distributed
at the University of Wrocław and the Russian version at two universities
in Moscow.
Although over 600 participants were engaged in the project, only 400
DCTs were selected for analysis. Some of the DCTs had to be excluded
because they were incomplete or because the respondents had a different
native language from those analyzed. To ensure comparability across
groups, the amount of DCTs was further reduced to match the size of
the groups. The DCTs which were removed from the corpus were chosen
randomly, allowing me to create a corpus containing 100 questionnaires
in each of the languages, with equal distribution between genders (50/50).
Requests across cultures 197
Accordingly, the data analyzed in this study consist of a total of 400
requests elicited under identical contextual conditions from comparable
population groups.
3. The analysis
The present analysis compares preferences for direct vs. indirect realiza-
tions of the head act and the use of internal and external modification
in the four languages under investigation. It thus addresses the question
of whether indirectness correlates with other forms of face-redress or
whether downgraders and supportive moves are used to compensate for
the higher degree of imposition inherent in more direct request realiza-
tions. The categorization of the data is based on the coding scheme sug-
gested in the CCSARP (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989).
3.1. Direct vs. conventionally indirect requests
While German, Polish and Russian have all been characterized as more
direct than English (e. g., Wierzbicka 1985; Lubecka 2000; Rathmayr
1994; Larina 2003, House 2005), there has been no attempt to compare
the degree of directness characterizing these three languages. The follow-
ing cross-linguistic comparison of the preferences for direct and conven-
tionally indirect realizations of the head act focuses on imperative and
interrogative constructions.
Although Polish and Russian offer a wider range of direct request
strategies (see e. g., Marcjanik 1997; and Berger 1997) than the two Ger-
manic languages, those occurring in my data all take the form of impera-
tive constructions, such as:
(1) Get the notes for me mate.
(2) Bring mir mal eben die Notizen vorbei.
‘Bring me (downtoner) the notes.’
(3) Poz
˙
ycz mi notatek
1
.
‘Lend me the notes.’
(4) Одолжи кокт а арu д.
‘Lend me the notes for a few days.’
Interrogative constructions, in contrast, cover various syntactic struc-
tures, such as questions in the present tense or the conditional, with and
without a modal verb, or more complex constructions including lexical
downgraders, such as consultative devices.
198 Eva Ogiermann
(5) Leihst du mir deine Notizen?
‘Will you lend me your notes?’
(6) Moge
˛
od ciebie poz
˙
yczyc
´
notatki?
‘Can I borrow the notes from you?’
(7) Т ог б дат вои кокт?
‘Couldn’t you give me your notes?’
(8) Would it be ok if I borrowed your notes?
Table 1 shows the distribution of these two request types across lan-
guages. The category ‘other’ includes five off-record strategies (three in
German and two in Polish) and nine declarative constructions, such as:
(9) Müsste mir morgen Deine Notizen kopieren.
‘I’d have to copy your notes tomorrow.’
(10) Chciałbym przeanalizowac
´
Twoje notatki.
‘I’d like to analyze your notes.’
Table 1. Imperative vs. interrogative head act realizations across languages.
N ⫽ 100 English German Polish Russian
Imperative 4 5 20 35
Interrogative 97 88 75 65
other 8 6
Total 101 101 101 100
While imperatives are marginal in the English and German data, they
make up 20 % of the Polish and 35 % of the Russian requests. The strong
preference for conventional indirectness in my English and German data
is in accordance with previous findings. However, since interrogative
constructions are the preferred strategy in all four languages, the re-
stricted applicability of interrogative constructions suggested for Polish
and Russian in previous literature cannot be confirmed.
The distribution in the Polish data renders support to Marcjanik’s
(1997) claim that questions constitute the most frequent request type in
Polish, though, considering the informal character of the situation, one
might have expected a higher proportion of imperative constructions.
The preference for interrogative constructions is even more surprising
for Russian, where indirect requests are regarded as typical of formal
conversations (Rathmayr 1994: 266), characterized by high social dis-
tance and power (Mills 1992: 68).
Requests across cultures 199
3.2. Syntactic downgraders
The cross-cultural differences in the overall level of directness established
so far suggest that more disparities can be expected in the use of request
modification across languages. Since syntactic downgraders, such as
modal verbs, tense, and negation modify the illocutionary force of the
head act, they are regarded as instances of internal modification.
Among the various interrogative constructions, some of which were
listed in examples 5 to 8, ability questions with the modal verb can/
können/mo
´
c/оч constitute the most frequent request type in my data.
Table 2 illustrates the preferences for ability questions across languages,
while taking into account syntactic downgrading through the use of
tense and negation.
In the English and German data, most of the ability questions were
formulated in the present tense. The relatively low frequency of condi-
tional constructions, which render the request more polite by reducing
“the expectations to the fulfilment of the request” (Trosborg 1995: 210),
is likely to be related to the informal character of the situation. In the
two Slavic languages, however, the conditional is the preferred tense,
suggesting that the overall higher level of directness characterizing the
Polish and Russian requests in my data is reduced by the frequent use
of the conditional.
According to Marcjanik, ability questions are the most polite request
realization among all the interrogative constructions available for the
performance of requests in Polish (1997: 165), with the conditional being
more polite than the present tense (1997: 167). Betsch suggests that Rus-
sian ability questions formulated in the conditional are used “either in a
rather formal, written style or if an important request is to be expressed”
(2003: 278).
Another syntactic downgrader accompanying ability questions is ne-
gation. In Russian, especially, negation is regarded as an obligatory el-
ement, its absence potentially leading to an interpretation of the con-
struction as a genuine question (Rathmayr 1994: 266; Betsch 2003: 280).
In my Russian data, negation indeed seems to serve as a marker of
Table 2. Preferences for the modal verb can across languages.
English German Polish Russian
can I kann ich moge
˛
45 32 4
can you kannst du moz
˙
esz () ожш10 16 14 5
could I könnte ich mo
´
głbym15 14 5
could you könntest du (nie) mo
´
głbys
´
т ог б3 5 34 41
73 67 57 46
200 Eva Ogiermann
illocutionary force in conditional constructions, all of which were ne-
gated. However, three of the five ability questions in the present tense
were not negated (cf. Formanovskaja 1982: 132).
In Polish, negation is optional and can imply genuine doubt about the
ability to comply with the request. There are three negated constructions
in my data: two ability questions: Czy nie mo
´
głbys
´
… ‘Whether you
could not …’ and one conditional construction without a modal verb:
Nie poz
˙
yczyłbys
´
… ‘Would you not lend …’. While in these expressions,
negation softens the illocutionary force of the request, negated availabil-
ity questions, such as Nie masz … ‘Don’t you have …’ are more likely
to be interpreted as expressing genuine uncertainty about the availability
of the requested object and, thus, the potential success of the request.
This uncertainty can be strengthened by the addition of the downtoner
moz
˙
e ‘perhaps’ or przypadkiem ‘by any chance’ (cf. Marcjanik 1997:
163⫺164).
There are no negated constructions in my German data, though the
use of negation as a syntactic downgrader in German requests has been
reported in previous studies. Barron provides examples of negation of
preparatory conditions in her discussion of German syntactic downgrad-
ers, such as Kannst Du nicht x? ‘Cannot you x?’ (2003: 145), whereas
Faerch and Kasper state that the use of negation in German requests is
“much more restricted” than it is in Danish (1989: 227). In English,
however, the sentence “Couldn’t you (possibly) pass the salt?”, which is
a literal translation of the corresponding, highly polite, Russian request
realization has been classified as rude (Brown and Levinson 1987: 135).
As table 2 illustrates, interrogative constructions with a modal verb
denoting ability can be formulated either in the 1
st
or in the 2
nd
person
and, thus, represent the speaker’s or the hearer’s perspective (Blum-
Kulka et al. 1989: 19). The choice of perspective has been shown to
affect the illocutionary force of the request. According to Blum-Kulka
et al., “avoidance to name the hearer as actor can reduce the form’s level
of coerciveness” (1989: 19). On a similar note, Leech argues that a re-
quest can be softened “by omission of reference to the cost to h” and
suggests that “Could I borrow this electric drill? is marginally more po-
lite than Could you lend me this electric drill?“ (Leech 1983: 134).
Interestingly, English offers two different verbs denoting the process
of borrowing/lending, as if referring to different activities depending on
whether they are viewed from the speaker’s or the hearer’s perspective.
This culture-specific distinction indicates that one should be careful to
assume the above interpretation to be universal. In a culture placing
particular emphasis on independence and indirectness, phrasing the re-
quest in the 1
st
person may be seen as reducing the imposition on the
hearer. In a culture that values directness, portraying the speaker as
Requests across cultures 201
Table 3. Request perspective across languages.
N ⫽ 100 English German Polish Russian
Speaker-oriented 76 63 14 4
Hearer-oriented 18 35 85 96
other 7 3 2
Total 101 101 101 100
responsible for the successful outcome of the request could be interpre-
ted as manipulative (cf. section 1.2).
The fact that none of the ability questions in the Russian data and
only a few in the Polish data were formulated in the first person seems
to support such an interpretation. Although Russian requests in the first
person are not impossible (Formanovskaja 1982: 131), it has been argued
that speech acts formulated in the second person are generally more
polite than those in the first person, an important feature of Russian
politeness being to acknowledge the role of the addressee (Nikolaeva
2000, cited in Rathmayr 1996: 22).
Table 3 shows the preferences for request perspective across languages.
While imperative constructions are always hearer-oriented and declara-
tive utterances tend to be speaker-oriented, interrogative constructions
without a modal verb tend to take the hearer’s perspective. As already
illustrated, those introduced by the modal verb ‘can’ can be formulated
from the speaker’s as well as hearer’s perspective. Although previous
research tends to classify both formulations as query preparatory (e. g.,
Barron 2003), strictly speaking, ‘Can you …?’ refers to the hearer’s abil-
ity to perform the request, while ‘Can I …?’ functions as a request for
permission.
In English requests for permission the modal verbs ‘can’ and ‘may’
are interchangeable, but the latter does not occur in my data. The Ger-
man modal verb denoting permission dürfen, in contrast, was used nine
times. In Polish and Russian, the only modal verb serving this function
is that denoting ability, though permission can be requested by means of
a performative verb.
Although most requests tend to take the hearer’s or the speaker’s per-
spective, requests can also be inclusive: ‘Could we …?’ or impersonal:
‘Is it possible to …?’
(11) Would it be at all possible to copy some notes?
The two Slavic languages also have the impersonal form: moz
˙
na/ожо
⫹ infinitive ‘is it possible to’. This impersonal construction does not
occur in my data, but three Russian respondents combined ожо with
202 Eva Ogiermann
the first person pronoun я ‘I’, which translates as ‘is it possible for me’
and shifts the perspective from neutral to the speaker’s.
3.3. Lexical downgraders
Along with syntactic downgraders, lexical downgraders are generally re-
garded as forms of internal modification, i. e., modification within the
head act. The most frequent phrasal downgraders in the English data
are consultative devices, which modify the illocutionary force of the re-
quest by consulting the hearer’s opinion (House and Kasper 1987: 1269):
(12) Do you think I could copy your notes?
What is worth noting about this example is that although consultative
devices acknowledge the role of the hearer, the speaker is still portrayed
as the one executing the activity named in the propositional content of
the request. Among the 34 consultative devices found in my English
data, only two are combined with the hearer’s perspective while seven
are embedded in infinitive constructions, which tend to take a neutral
perspective (compare example 11).
Since consultative devices are negative politeness strategies, it is not
surprising that they occur mainly in English. Previous research has
shown that they are very rare in German (House and Kasper 1987: 1275;
Faerch and Kasper 1989: 234), and also my German data contain only
two constructions equivalent to the English consultative devices, for ex-
ample:
(13) Wäre das OK für Dich, dass ich deine Notizen kopiere?
‘Would it be OK for you if I copied your notes?’
Three more phrasal downgraders were classified as consultative devices,
although they serve a slightly different function; namely wäre nett wenn
‘it would be nice if …’, es wäre echt total toll wenn ‘it would be really
totally great if …’ and magst du so lieb sein ‘will you be so dear’. Similar
formulae were found in the Polish data:
(14) Czy byłbys
´
tak miły imo
´
głbys
´
przynies
´
c
´
mi notatki?
‘Would you be so nice and could bring me the notes?’
Although the formula used in this example serves a function similar to
that of a consultative device, asking somebody to be nice ⫺ or implying
that complying with the request would classify them as nice ⫺ is not
equivalent to consulting somebody’s opinion.
Likewise, the Russian data include a formula appealing to the hearer’s
kindness/goodness, namely the imperative construction Бuд добр! lit.
Requests across cultures 203
‘Be good!’, which has been described as a politeness marker in previous
research (e. g., Rathmayr 1994; Brehmer 2000). However, the imperative
construction makes it problematic to classify this formula as a device
consulting the hearer’s opinion and since it cannot appear within the
head act, it does not even classify as an internal modifier.
While consultative devices seem to be culture-specific, the use of the
politeness marker please as a device softening the imposition inherent in
a request is ⫺ if not universal ⫺ cross-culturally shared. There are 16
instances of please in the English data, its German equivalent bitte was
used 19 times, the Russian ожалuта 22, and the Polish prosze
˛
three
times. As these figures already indicate, although speakers of all four
languages use this politeness marker, its applicability and illocutionary
force are likely to vary across languages.
In contrast to the English please or the German bitte, the Russian
ожалuта cannot be combined with ability questions (Rathmayr
1994: 266; Mills 1992: 67). Since the Russian politeness marker occurs
exclusively with imperative constructions (Betsch 2003: 280), one could
also say that it was used in 22 of 35 (63 %) possible cases in my data.
The applicability of the Polish politeness marker, on the other hand,
is restricted by the performative function of the word prosze
˛
, which is
the first person singular form of the verb prosic
´
‘to ask/beg’. It is a
formulaic request in its own right that can be further modified, e. g.,
Bardzo Cie
˛
prosze
˛
‘I beg you very much’. Accordingly, the low frequency
of politeness marking in the Polish data is, at least in part, related to the
fact that prosze
˛
cannot occur within the head act.
Consequently, while politeness markers appear in all four sets of data,
they are subject to culture-specific restrictions concerning the combina-
tion possibilities with the different types of head acts as well as the pos-
sibilities of embedding them into the request. Although the words please
and bitte are generally regarded as instances of internal modification,
that is elements appearing within the head act, a closer look at my data
shows that the examined languages differ in positioning the politeness
marker within the utterance.
(15) Can I borrow your notes please?
(16) Kannst Du mir bitte Deine Notizen ausleihen?
‘Can you please lend me your notes?’
(17) Prosze
˛
, poz
˙
ycz mi swoje notatki.
‘Please, lend me your notes’
(18)
Да
Give
ожалuта
please
ттради.
notes.
‘Give me the notes please’
204 Eva Ogiermann
Table 4. Position of the politeness marker across languages.
N ⫽ 100 English German Polish Russian
Preceding head act 4123
Within head act 2 16 16
Following head act 10213
Total 16 19 3 22
Whereas in English, German and Russian, the politeness marker can
precede, follow the head act, or appear within it, Polish does not offer
the last possibility. Hence, prosze
˛
cannot be regarded as an internal mod-
ifier, and even English shows a strong preference for using please outside
the head act. The figures in table 4 suggest not only that word order is
likely to have an impact on the illocutionary force of the request, but
also that the implications of the position of politeness marking within
the utterance, and of the stress it receives, are likely to vary across lan-
guages.
The distribution of downtoners, that is devices reducing the imposi-
tion of the request, again shows that languages differ not only in the
extent to which they modify the impositive force of the request, but also
in the linguistic means they employ. While there are two occurrences of
possibly, one of at all and one of by any chance in the English data, the
German data contain 20 instances of mal (eben) ‘just’ and ten of viel-
leicht ‘perhaps’. Four Polish respondents used the word moz
˙
e ‘perhaps’,
but no adverbial downtoners were identified in the Russian data. The
Russian respondents, however, show a strong preference for situation-
specific expressions minimizing the imposition of the request, such as а
арu д ‘for a few days’ and до автра ‘until tomorrow’.
Whereas adverbial downtoners and modal particles (on the use of
modal particles in Russian requests see Zybatov 1990 and Berger 1998)
can be employed in virtually any request situation, minimizers reflect the
particular situation in which they are used ⫺ as well as the speaker’s
concern for the hearer’s needs. Internal lexical modifiers specifying and
minimizing the duration of the requested favour appear 24 times in the
Russian, twice in the English, and once in the Polish data.
Linguistic devices portraying the size of the favour as small lead us
directly to another type of downtoner, namely diminutives, which oper-
ate on a morphological level and have been assigned a central role as
devices softening the illocutionary force of Polish (Wierzbicka 1991) and
Russian (Larina 2003; Brehmer 2006) directive speech acts.
Brown and Levinson define diminutives as positive politeness strate-
gies when they serve as “in-group identity markers” (1987: 109) and as
Requests across cultures 205
negative politeness strategies in their function as hedges or minimizers
(1987: 157, 177). Diminutives used within the head act are more likely
to function as negative politeness devices, though they can also be used
by a more powerful speaker to minimize his or her right to issue the
request (Brehmer 2006: 33).
If one considers the central role assigned to diminutives, in particular
in imperative constructions (Wierzbicka 1991: 51; Larina 2003: 94;
Brehmer 2006: 34), it is surprising that there are no diminutives in the
Polish, and only five in the Russian data. None of them appears in an
imperative construction and one does not even occur within the head
act. In the following example, the diminutive portrays the time for which
the desired object will be kept, which has already been restricted to one
day, as particularly short.
(19) Можо я воu u тбя а дк кокт?
‘Is it possible for me to take from you the notes for a day-DIM?’
Diminutive forms were either applied to words referring to the time or
the notes, confirming that diminutives reduce the illocutionary force of
the directive speech act by portraying the propositional content of the
request as small (Brehmer 2006: 32), thus qualifying as negative polite-
ness devices in Brown and Levinson’s terms.
Table 5. Distribution of lexical downgrading across languages.
N ⫽ 100 English German Polish Russian
Consultative devices 34 5 3
Politeness markers 15 19 3 22
Adverbial downtoners 4 30 4
Minimizers 2 1 24
Diminutives 5
Total 55 54 11 51
Although table 5 clearly shows that English, German and Russian ex-
hibit similar frequencies of lexical downgrading, which is much higher
than that established for Polish, the total numbers are indicative at best
since the different types of downgraders are not interchangeable; nor are
they pragmatically equivalent across languages.
Ultimately, no conclusions can be drawn as to cross-cultural differ-
ences in request modification without taking into account the distribu-
tion of external modification, the so-called supportive moves.
206 Eva Ogiermann
3.4. Supportive moves
In contrast to syntactic and lexical downgraders, which have been classi-
fied as internal modifiers, supportive moves are external to the head act.
Although it is the head act that carries the illocutionary force of the
request, supportive moves can also be used on their own and constitute
off-record requests. Grounders, in particular, may include a hint to be
taken up by the hearer.
When combined with a head act, however, grounders supply a reason
for making the request. Explaining why it is necessary to impose on the
hearer makes the request more plausible and may thus increase her of
his willingness to comply with it. The grounders occurring in my data
generally refer to the speaker’s illness preventing her or him from going
to the lecture.
(20) I’m not feeling too good.
(21) Oh man geht’s mir dreckig.
‘Oh man, do I feel shit.’
(22) Dopadła mnie jakas
´
przekle
˛
ta choroba.
‘Some damned illness got me.’
(23) Я тuт алот риболл.
‘I got a little ill here.’
Grounders are most frequent in the English and least frequent in the
Russian data, which might be due to the overall lower social distance
characterizing Russian culture (see Bergelson 2003). Perhaps, borrowing
notes is more common at Russian universities, which would increase the
right to issue the request and the expectations of compliance.
The term preparator has been applied to several related strategies in
previous literature ⫺ all of them “preparing the hearer for the ensuing
request by announcing it or asking permission to perform it” (House
and Kasper 1987: 1277). Trosborg distinguishes four different categor-
Table 6. Distribution of supportive moves across languages.
N ⫽ 100 English German Polish Russian
Grounders 81 63 59 43
Preparators 1 16 5(introduction)
7865(availability)
Indebtedness 4 4 12 5(gratitude)
2761(compensation)
Total 95 82 99 59
Requests across cultures 207
ies of preparators: those preparing the content; the speech act; those
checking on availability; and those getting a pre-commitment (1995:
216⫺217).
I would like to limit the distinction to just two types of preparators,
namely those checking on the availability of the notes and those intro-
ducing the request. While the only example of the latter in the English
data is an interrogative construction aimed at getting a pre-commitment,
those found in the Polish data are declarative sentences and can be better
described as devices preparing the hearer for the request by merely an-
nouncing it. The preparators introducing the request found in the Rus-
sian data, in contrast, are all formulated in the imperative and they
constitute requests for help.
(24) Could you do me a favour?
(25) Mam do Ciebie ogromna
˛
pros
´
be
˛
.
‘I have a huge favour to ask you.’
(26) Дрuг, ооги.
‘Friend, help.’
What is problematic about regarding requests for help as preparators,
though, is that they can constitute a request on their own, which is why
requests for help were only classified as preparators when combined with
another head act. Another Russian expression that has been included in
the category of preparators is the formula Бuд добр! ‘Be good!’ dis-
cussed above. While this expression does not classify as a consultative
device, a request to ‘be good’ can be regarded as a formula introducing the
request proper, i. e., the occasion for the hearer to prove his goodness.
While preparators introducing the request consist of formulaic ⫺ and
therefore often culture-specific ⫺ expressions, preparators checking on
availability refer to the specific situation in which the request is uttered.
In my data, this category covers expressions ascertaining that the hearer
is in possession of the requested object, such as:
(27) Du schreibst doch immer mit, oder?
‘You always take notes, don’t you?’
(28) Did you bother going?
In contrast to formulaic preparators introducing the speech act, prepara-
tors checking on availability were very similar across languages, not only
in terms of semantic content and pragmatic force but also in terms of fre-
quency.
Indebtedness can be expressed through a routinized formula or, on a
more practical level, by offering compensation. All languages but Ger-
208 Eva Ogiermann
man relied mainly on formulaic expressions of gratitude, with those
found in the Polish data being not only most frequent but also most
elaborate and effusive.
(29) Be
˛
de
˛
Ci bardzo, bardzo wdzie
˛
czny! Z go
´
ry dzie
˛
ki.
‘I’ll be very, very grateful to you! Thanks in advance.’
Promises of reward can take the form of formulaic acknowledgments of
debt, as illustrated by the English example, or involve material compen-
sation ⫺ a strategy preferred by the German respondents.
(30) I owe you one.
(31) Trinken wa nächste Woche mal schön nen Kaffee.
‘We will nicely drink a coffee next week.’
Another supportive move that occurs in my data and that, to the best
of my knowledge, has not been discussed in previous literature are ex-
pressions minimizing the imposition of the request by assuring the hearer
that the notes will not be kept long or that they will be returned soon.
These expressions are particularly frequent in the Russian data, where
they appear 19 times.
(32) Долго држат бuдu, раu ж врu.
‘I will not keep them long, I will return them straight away.’
The Polish data include seven and the English two instances of this strat-
egy, but no similar expressions were located in the German data. Hence,
while Russians did not justify their requests as often as did the speakers
of the other three languages, they made the request sound plausible in a
different way, namely by letting the hearer know that the imposition of
the request will be kept to a minimum. Incidentally, this external modi-
fier performs a very similar function to the internal modifier that has
been labelled minimizer. Both reduce the duration of the favour and
both are particularly frequent in the Russian data.
4. Conclusion
The results of the present study show that in all four examined languages
requests can be realized at different levels of directness and their illocuti-
onary force can be downgraded by means of internal (syntactic and lexi-
cal) and external modification. Cross-cultural differences have been
mainly established at the level of substrategies, their linguistic realiza-
tions, restrictions on their applicability and, consequently, the fre-
quencies with which they were used.
Requests across cultures 209
The preferences for direct vs. conventionally indirect strategies across
languages show a distributional pattern which seems to be in accordance
with the geographical position of the countries where the data were col-
lected. The use of imperative constructions increases from West to East:
with 4 % in the English, 5 % in the German, 20 % in the Polish, and 35 %
in the Russian data.
The strong preference for interrogative constructions in the English
and German data confirms previous findings (see, for example, Faerch
and Kasper 1989). However, while the results for these two languages
can be compared with results obtained with the same data collection
instrument, under the same contextual conditions and from similar pop-
ulations, no such comparison can be made for Polish and Russian.
The level of directness characterizing the Polish data illustrates the
central role assigned to interrogative constructions by Marcjanik (1997)
and confirmed by Lubecka’s results (2000), and provides counterevi-
dence to Wierzbicka’s early ⫺ and still extensively cited ⫺ claims (1985,
1991) on the broad applicability of the imperative in Polish.
The amount of imperative constructions in the Russian data is more
difficult to interpret. Since nearly two thirds of the respondents opted
for a conventionally indirect head act realization, previous results, ac-
cording to which the imperative constitutes the most frequent request
type in Russian (e. g., Rathmayr 1994; Berger 1997; Brehmer 2000; Lar-
ina 2003) cannot be confirmed. On the other hand, one should bear in
mind that 35 % of the Russian requests contained imperative construc-
tions, which by far exceeds the amount of direct requests established for
other languages. While research on Hebrew and Spanish has shown both
languages as displaying a relatively high level of directness (e. g., Blum-
Kulka 1987; Blum-Kulka and House 1989), Hebrew responses to the
‘Notes’ scenario contain 16 % of direct requests and those in Argentinean
Spanish only 10 %. These figures are even exceeded by the proportion of
imperative constructions in my Polish data, where they were employed
in 20 % of all cases.
Clearly, the choice of indirect vs. direct requests strategies depends on
various contextual factors, and the ‘Notes’ scenario seems to depict a
situation with a high degree of agreement on the acceptability of conven-
tional indirectness across cultures. Accordingly, the relatively high fre-
quency of direct requests in some languages can be expected to be even
higher in other situations.
Another interesting distributional pattern, again in accordance with
the geographical position of the four countries, is that of the request-
perspective. The speaker’s perspective was most frequent in the English
data (73 %), slightly less prominent in the German (63 %), and much less
popular in the Polish (14 %) and Russian (4 %) data.
210 Eva Ogiermann
The increasing amount of imperative constructions and the hearer’s
perspective as one moves from West to East both suggest that in Slavic
cultures, requests are not regarded as threats to the hearer’s face to the
degree that they are in Western Europe. This is reflected in the relatively
high level of directness and in the tendency to acknowledge the hearer’s
role in performing the request (cf. Rathmayr 1994).
Another strategy which follows the same distributional pattern is the
grounder, whose frequency can be viewed as indicative of the estimated
necessity of justifying the intrusion upon the hearer’s face in a given
culture, and which occurs 81 times in the English, 63 in the German, 59
times in the Polish, and 43 times in the Russian data.
These culture-specific preferences show that cultures differ in the ex-
tent to which they assign importance to negative face, thus confirming
the validity of the distinction between positive and negative politeness
cultures suggested by Brown and Levinson (1987) while, at the same
time, showing that emphasis on positive vs. negative face needs is a
matter of degree rather than a clear-cut distinction (cf. Ogiermann 2006).
The distribution of modifiers further illustrates that although requests
were downgraded in all examined languages, the preferences for the vari-
ous downgrading devices are culture-specific. While the English respon-
dents used consultative devices and the Germans downtoners, Poles and
Russians relied more heavily on syntactic downgrading, such as tense
and negation.
The low frequency of politeness markers in Polish is equalled out by
the strong preference for formulaic preparators and expressions of grati-
tude emphasizing the imposition of the request and thereby acknowledg-
ing the hearer’s role. Russian, on the other hand, shows a particular
preference for internal and external modifiers minimizing the duration
of the favour, and thus showing consideration for the hearer ⫺ though
diminutives play a much less central role in the two Slavic languages
than predicted in previous research.
Despite the criticism directed at Brown and Levinson’s theory in the
past decades, they must be credited with developing a framework for
cross-cultural analysis, for which no alternative has been offered so far.
There is no way of applying theories rejecting the possibility of making
generalizations and predictions (Mills 2003; Watts 2003) to the con-
trastive study of politeness phenomena. While analyzing politeness as an
unpredictable concept constructed and negotiated in ongoing conversa-
tion sheds light on the infinite possibilities of using language, Brown and
Levinson’s “static”, “speaker-oriented” and “speech act based” approach
to politeness has revealed divergent patterns in strategy choice across
languages.
Requests across cultures 211
Even though no utterance is inherently polite but merely ‘open to
interpretation’ as such, the quantitative approach of cross-cultural re-
search has illustrated that there is a great degree of consensus among
members of a culture, allowing for predictions to be made on the appro-
priateness of particular structures in a given context. These predictions
are particularly valuable when it comes to communicating in a foreign
language. Whether the strategies employed in order to save face result
in polite or just “politic” (Watts 2003) behaviour does not really matter
as long as by using them, the non-native speaker can avoid being unin-
tentionally rude.
With the ongoing process of globalization and the increasing need for
intercultural communication, it is essential to find out more about cul-
tural differences in communicative styles. The insights into cross-cultural
differences in requesting behaviour offered in the present study are based
on a limited amount of data. While I have restricted my analysis to a
situation characterized by the frequent use of conventional indirect-
ness ⫺ one of the objectives of this study being to show that the two
Slavic languages do not rely as heavily on the imperative as has been
claimed in previous research ⫺ other situations are likely to lead to
different strategy choices.
Mills’ analysis (1991), for instance, illustrates the impact of time pres-
sure on requestive behaviour in Moscow’s public sphere. The examples
cover situations in crowded places, such as shops or public transport,
where pragmatic clarity and brevity are a necessity, leaving no time for
indirectness and elaborate formulations.
Furthermore, despite the advantages of the DCT, consisting in the
comparability and amount of the elicited data, in order to be able to
make more refined statements on politeness norms across cultures, other
types of data should also be used. Although recordings of authentic con-
versations are regarded as the ideal data for the study of politeness,
focusing on comparing a particular speech act across languages makes
this type of data problematic. Hence, speech act studies based on re-
corded speech tend to be restricted to a specific setting characterized by
a frequent occurrence of the speech act under investigation and generally
do not attempt cross-cultural comparison (but see Aston 1995).
Linguistic corpora, on the other hand, seem to be a promising re-
source for speech act studies, and they have been employed for the study
of Russian requests. Unfortunately, the Polish and Russian corpora de-
veloped so far contain mainly literary texts and are, thus, of limited use
for the study of spoken language. Furthermore, despite the ongoing pro-
cess of tagging, the researchers encounter difficulties in identifying all
pertinent constructions
2
. Russian corpus data, however, have proved
useful for the investigation of the Russian politeness system from a dia-
212 Eva Ogiermann
chronic perspective. A comparison of request realizations in literary texts
from different centuries has shown that ability questions are a new devel-
opment in Russian (Berger 1997).
Perhaps the high proportion of conventional indirectness in my Rus-
sian and Polish data can be ascribed to the heavy influence of Western
culture on these cultures since the fall of the Iron Curtain. Changes in
the interactive styles of Russian citizens have been described in Kron-
haus’ study of greetings and partings on Russian TV, where he identifies
a shift of Russian politeness norms towards Western (2004: 164, 175).
Similarly, Nikolaeva observes that apologies are increasingly used in sit-
uations which, according to Russian etiquette, require thanking or say-
ing please (2000: 7).
Bionote
Eva Ogiermann is currently employed at the University of Portsmouth
where she is working on a project on Cross-cultural Conversation Analy-
sis. Her main research interests are pragmatics, sociolinguistics, polite-
ness theories, language and gender, and conversation analysis. Most of
her work takes a contrastive approach and centers on the question of the
culture-specificity of language use. E-mail: Eva.Ogiermann@port.ac.uk
Notes
1. Since one of the reviewers has pointed out to me that my examples contain gram-
matical errors, I think it may be necessary to draw attention to the fact that all my
examples come from the data. Some of my translations have been further criticized
for being unidiomatic. The translations of the German, Polish and Russian exam-
ples have been kept as close to the original as possible since a cross-cultural analysis
of conventionalized politeness formulae makes it necessary to provide literal rather
than idiomatic translations. While an idiomatic translation involves adapting the
formula to its culture-specific conceptualization in the language into which it is
translated, a contrastive study of politeness phenomena aims at capturing the cul-
tural implications of the formula in the original language, which is often embodied
by lexical choices and their culture-specific meanings. I would like to thank the two
anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on this paper.
2. Berger (1997: 22) identifies ability questions by combining:
negation marker ⫹ second person forms of оч in the present/conditional
As my data show, not all constructions in the present tense are negated, in which
case they cannot be identified in this way. Negated requests without a modal verb
were identified by combining:
personal pronoun ⫹ negation marker ⫹ ?
However, since personal pronouns can be, and often are, left out, a considerable
proportion of this type of requests cannot be accessed. Betsch (2003: 280) identifies
imperative constructions serving as requests by locating all instances of the word
Requests across cultures 213
please, thus excluding imperatives without politeness marking and including other
constructions in which please is used. The corpora used by these authors can be
accessed via: TUSNELDA (Tübinger Sammlung Nutzbarer Empirischer Linguis-
tischer Datenstrukturen), available at: http://www.sfb441.uni-tuebingen.de/tusnelda.
html (accessed 05 March 2008).
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