Abstract
A cross-cultural study of requests for a pen in Japanese and in American English provides empirical evidence for a common factor, Discernment, which we hypothesize operates in all sociolinguistic systems of politeness. We also propose a complementary factor, Volition, hypothesizing that differences in the weighting of the two factors afford one way to characterize sociolinguistic systems of politeness in different languages. The results of the study further offer empirical support for the theories of Brown and Levinson and Leech.
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