Cross-cultural and situational variation in requesting behaviour: Perceptions of social situations and strategic usage of request patterns

Abstract

Brown and Levinson (1978) and Brown and Levinson (1987) is that social distance, power and imposition are the most important factors influencing speakers’ linguistic choices and that there is a positive correlation between these social variables and the degree of indirectness employed. The present study investigates the relationship between social/situational and cultural factors and native and non-native speakers’ requesting behaviour. It examines whether the requestive strategies of English native speakers and of Greek ESL learners follow a similar trend across different social situations. It additionally tests whether the same social situations are perceived and rated similarly by the two groups and the extent to which the speakers’ directness is influenced by familiarity, power and imposition. Results have shown that there are high levels of cross-cultural agreement between the two groups for trends of situational variation but also some cross-cultural disagreement on the specific directness levels employed for given situations. Even though significant differences in the speakers’ assessment of social reality seems to explain the differences in their linguistic choices to some extent, this study argues that power, familiarity and imposition alone do not always decide speakers’ directness. A number of intervening situational and cultural factors need to be taken into account when interpreting speakers’ linguistic choices.