Politeness Strategies in Electronic Communication: The Speech Act of Request

Abstract

Linguistic politeness plays an important role when establishing respectful interpersonal relationships in any communicative situation, the academic context including. The speech act of request can become a face- threatening act if language users are unable to adapt their language use to the social variables determined by the context of use. The present study aimed at establishing an understanding of the negative politeness strategies and request strategies used by tertiary level students in electronic communication in English. Schauer’s (2009) request strategies and Levinson’s (1987) seminal work on politeness strategies laid the foundations for the present paper. The framework by Biber and Conrad (2009) for analysing situational characteristics proved a valuable resource for the case study, which drew its data from a corpus of email messages written in the time period from August 9, 2010 to June 25, 2011. The obtained data demonstrated that the Latvian students tended to use direct and conventionally indirect request strategies at the same time employing such negative politeness strategies as being conventionally indirect, hedging, minimizing the imposition, and apologizing. The hedged performatives used in the direct requests mitigated the illocutionary force of the utterance. However, the impositive face-threatening nature of the speech act of requesting determines the necessity of raising English as a foreign language students’ awareness of conventionally indirect request strategies and mitigating devices in a variety of contextual situations in order to guarantee the need of individuals to be respected and appropriately understood.