Effects of social power on language use across speech communities

Abstract

This paper discusses the discourse strategies that status‐unequal inter‐locutors use in expressing disagreement. It reveals semantic formulas as influenced by the role relationships, thus the relative power and status of interlocutors. It also compares and contrasts the discourse strategies used by native speakers of Turkish and American English for the same speech event in order to obtain a cross‐cultural perspective. Data was collected from 80 native speakers of Turkish and 14 native speakers of American English using a written elicitation task (Takahashi & Beebe 1993). Analysis was done by uncovering the semantic strategies and politeness formulas which status‐unequal interlocutors use in carrying out this face‐threatening speech function. Findings indicate style variation in accordance with role relationships and reveal the sociolinguistic norms of different discourse communities in the execution of the same speech act.