Polite Requests Research Articles

The Influence of L2 English Acquisition of the Request Speech Act on Persian Preschool Children

In Iran the age of learning English as a foreign language is decreasing yearly. It is obvious that learning English at a very early age is a most appropriate time to start. The investigation in this study is focused on the speech act of request. Instructional effects of learning request strategies are assessed in preschoolers who received instruction to find out whether the exposure to the foreign language learning enhances the development of request strategy use and brings about changes in their first language strategy use features. The data were collected from 10 preschool Iranian learners of English as a foreign language. The participants of the study took a two-semester speaking course in an academic setting in Iran. The study had a pretest and posttest design in which 10 conversations were used including polite request strategies of English to analyze instructional effects on the learners’ first language after the posttest, by comparing and measuring the backward transfer against the pretest results. The oral task was in the form of role plays which were also utilized for communicative practice with the learners. The data were rated for the extent of a foreign language effect on the first language by experienced tutors and linguistic analyses were done to identify the foreign language components of request strategies features in the first language production. Results showed that frequent use of English request strategy features in the first language was an indication of L2 students’ beneficial experience in their L1.

Democracia, concordia y deliberación pública en la" Política" de Aristóteles”

El artículo analiza la concepción aristotélica de las diferentes formas de democracia, atendiendo especialmente a los libros de la Política, con el objeto de identificar algunas conexiones entre las coordenadas teóricas de deliberación pública que se eligen en ellos y el juicio acerca de las formas políticas que consideran apropiadas. Se asume como centro de análisis un pensador clásico clave para comprender la formación del vocabulario político europeo. El trabajo toma en consideración asimismo el elogio de la homonoia en la Ética Nicomáquea, que se presenta como una condición irrenunciable de cohesión social en la polis, así como la desconfianza aristotélica generalizada hacia la visión política del plethos y las prácticas de sorteo y votación extendidas en la democracia ateniense en los siglos V y IV a.C. Se pretende extraer algunas conclusiones relevantes sobre las razones, fundamentalmente epistemológicas, que impiden a un pensador como Aristóteles entender la democracia como una forma política beneficiosa para la comunidad humana.

Contextually tailored interventions can increase evidence-informed policy-making on health-enhancing physical activity: the experiences of two Danish municipalities

BackgroundThe present study aims to test out contextually tailored interventions to increase evidence-informed health-enhancing physical activity policy-making in two Danish municipalities.MethodsThe study was performed as experiments in natural settings. Based on results from a pre-intervention study defining the needs and contexts of the two settings, the interventions were developed based on logical models. The interventions aimed at increasing the use of knowledge in policy-making, primarily via strengthening intersectoral collaboration. The interventions were evaluated via pre-, post- and 12-month follow-up questionnaires and qualitative interviews were carried out prior to the intervention start.ResultsThe use of knowledge changed in several ways. In one municipality, the use of stakeholder and target group knowledge increased whereas, in the other municipality, the use of research knowledge increased. In both municipalities, the ability to translate knowledge to local context, the political request and the organisational procedures for use of knowledge increased during the interventions. There was some variation between the two settings, which shows the importance of tailoring to context. Most of the changes were diminished at the 12-month follow-up.ConclusionContextually tailored interventions have the potential to increase evidence-informed policy-making on health-enhancing physical activity. However, this finding needs to be tested in larger samples and its sustainability must be strengthened.

The Manuscript and Meaning of Malory's Morte Darthur: Rubrication, Commemoration, Memorialization by K. S. Whetter

Reviewed by: The Manuscript and Meaning of Malory's Morte Darthur: Rubrication, Commemoration, Memorialization by K. S. Whetter Cheryl Taylor Whetter, K. S., The Manuscript and Meaning of Malory's Morte Darthur: Rubrication, Commemoration, Memorialization (Arthurian Studies, 84), Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2017; hardback; pp. xiii; 245; 16 colour illustrations; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9781843844532. Except for feminist and other theory-based approaches, this book provides comprehensive coverage of the vast and contested field of Malory scholarship and criticism. It also offers the most detailed study to date of the Winchester manuscript (British Library, Additional MS 59678) in the context of comparable manuscripts. The argument is twofold: concerning 'manuscript', that 'Winchester's rubrication pattern is unique and that the most likely source for Winchester's layout is Malory himself' (p. 105); and in relation to 'meaning', that 'Winchester's consistent rubrication of names and its marginalia recording seemingly random knightly deeds all reinforce Malory's focus on the earthly values of knighthood, love and fellowship, and worshyp' (p. 105). Because an unknown number of medieval manuscripts has been lost, and the number of surviving manuscripts makes comprehensive checking impossible, the first claim, that Winchester's rubrication is unique, is ultimately unprovable. In supporting it, Dr Whetter nevertheless provides useful first-hand comparisons with rubrication in a selection of English and French romance, chronicle, and mixed-genre fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts. He further explores the ways in which Winchester's rubrication differs from that in manuscripts, currently held in British libraries, of Malory's French and English sources. The 'manuscript' half of this book therefore combines comprehensiveness with meticulous attention to detail. However, it also revisits, admittedly with additions or expansions, theories that have previously been confirmed or rejected. For example, in 2000 Helen Cooper pre-empted an important part of the 'thesis'(p. 72) when she deduced from her reconstruction of Caxton's missing exemplar that Malory himself devised the pattern of rubrication preserved in Winchester. Conversely, a page-long recapitulation of Takato Kato's attempt in 2002 to reduce the stages between Malory's archetype and Caxton's print ends with an acknowledgment that a discovery by the Morte Darthur's most recent editor, P. J. C. Field, has ruled out Kato's theory (p. 73). Perhaps it is an inevitable consequence of the labyrinthine state of Malory scholarship that this book sometimes retraces scholarly processes. Regarding 'meaning', the view that 'the earthly values of knighthood'(p. 105) predominate in the Morte Darthur virtually to the exclusion of what the discussion sometimes pejoratively refers to as 'religiosity', is both extreme and, as its many iterations suggest, difficult to defend. Overall the argument is a backward step in an interpretative process which, following what have often been [End Page 213] more nuanced excursions into both chivalric and religious readings, has achieved a desirable equilibrium (see p. 115). Among the objections to, or plausible alternatives for, this book's expositions of 'meaning', only a few that are closely text-related can be outlined in this short review. While Dr Whetter concedes that 'religious' prayer and prayer 'that is both sacred and chivalric' do occur, he cites polite requests between characters as support for the proposition that prayer in the Morte is 'formulaic rather than pious' (pp. 105–06). This seems to confuse two senses of 'prayer'. Again, the omission of rubrication for 'Amen' in most of Malory's colophons is alleged to support the Morte's 'secularity'. However, the phrasing of these prayers surely suggests that they are heartfelt and urgent. Unless a source is found, 'The Healing of Sir Urry', strategically inserted between Books VII and VIII, will retain its value as evidence for the priorities that Malory as an originating auctor enshrined in his Arthuriad. After Arthur and 110 knights have failed to heal the pitifully wounded knight, the king's stated reason for commanding the latecomer Launcelot to make an attempt accords with Dr Whetter's view that the episode's 'emphases […] poignantly reiterate and celebrate earthly fellowship' (p. 176). Yet Arthur's preliminary command, that Launcelot should not be forewarned, reveals a deeper motive that aligns with the episode's overall purpose, which is...

Performative verbs in requests: evidence from eighteenth-century letters

En la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII el marcador de cortesía pray era el marcador pragmático más habitual en peticiones mientras que la nueva forma please empezaba a surgir. Pray era una forma gramaticalizada con origen en el performativo I pray you/thee, pero please tiene un origen sintáctico diferente. En el mismo periodo se utilizaban otras expresiones performativas, frecuentes sobre todo en cartas, con el mismo patrón sintáctico que (I) pray (you) y que también se usaban en directivos. Estas expresiones hacían uso de la gran variedad de verbos de petición disponibles en el periodo de inglés moderno tardío, como beg, beseech, desire, entreat y request. Este trabajo revisa el conjunto de expresiones performativas utilizadas como marcadores de cortesía en peticiones en el Corpus of Late Eighteenth-Century Prose (1761-1790) para revisar su productividad y las funciones desempeñadas en la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII.

Emergent communicative norms in a contact language: Indirect requests in heritage Russian

AbstractThe present paper contributes to the study of speech act pragmatics, language contact, bilingualism, and heritage languages by bringing attention to the pragmatics of a contact language, heritage Russian (HR). The current study has a descriptive orientation, its main goal being to create a baseline for the pragmatic competence of speakers with incomplete acquisition of L1, which characterizes language contact in immigrant populations. We focus on communicative strategies and the choice of linguistic forms in requests made by heritage speakers of Russian, native speakers of full Russian, and native speakers of American English. The specific research questions explored in this study are: Is the linguistic variable – the form of polite requests – correlated with the population (speakers of HR vs. speakers of full Russian)? How do the differences play out? Do HR speakers have their own communicative norms? If yes, did these new norms develop under the influence of English or as a result of language-internal restructuring? We report that HR exhibits evidence of developing its own conventions for expressing polite requests which differ from the corresponding conventions in full Russian. Specifically, HR speakers use significantly more impersonal modals than monolingual native speakers of Russian in informal scenarios and rely on increased syntactic complexity to mark polite requests in formal scenarios. In indirect requests produced in both types of scenarios, HR speakers overuse the downgrader

American Employers as Political Machines

American employers are increasingly engaging their workers in the political process. Drawing on original surveys of firms and workers, this paper examines the extent to which employers act as political machines, channeling their employees into politics in ways intended to support corporate interests. I show that employer political requests greatly increased the likelihood that employees would report participating in politics around the 2014 election and employer requests were roughly as effective as those from unions and political parties. I also find that employer mobilization was most effective when employers used warnings of job loss to motivate participation and when employers could monitor the behavior of their employees, suggesting that employers are indeed acting as a type of political machine. My results shed light on the ways that American firms recruit workers into politics and show that employer mobilization of workers may be an important source of political power for business.

Politeness markers from Latin to Italian

This study compares the development of the Latin and Italian politeness markersquaesoandprego(‘please’). The markers, originally performative verbs meaning ‘I ask, I pray’, have developed politeness-related functions which index the action structure (i.e., polite requests) and the exchange structure (i.e., management of turns). Such developments correlate closely with the degree of integration of the markers and with their position within the sentence. In our analysis we describe these developments in both languages using diachronically balanced corpora of texts compiled at regular intervals. We discuss the pragmaticalization paths of politeness markers considering the role of left and right peripheries against the background of Schiffrin’s (1987) model of discourse and subsequent developments (the Val.Es.Co. model). The emergence of politeness-related functions can be accounted for by considering the interaction of exchange and action structures, the type of unit of discourse wherepregoandquaesoappear, and the position they occupy.

The use of situation-bound utterances in Chinese foreign language textbooks

AbstractThis article examines the use of situation-bound utterances (qíngjìng zhuānyòngyǔ情境专用语) in five mainstream Chinese foreign language textbooks in order to survey, categorize, and discuss their use therein. Kecskes (2000a. A cognitive-pragmatic approach to situation-bound utterances.Journal of Pragmatics32(5). 605–625) defined Situation-bound utterances (hereafter SBUs) as “highly conventionalized, prefabricated pragmatic units whose occurrences are tied to standardized communicative situations” (2000a: 606). SBUs are prevalent in Modern Chinese and in several ways represent Chinese culture. Many Chinese foreign language textbooks, however, underestimate the importance of SBUs. Based on information culled from five textbooks (Integrated Chinese中文听说读写,First Step中文起步,Basic Spoken Chinese基础中文：听与说,Practical Audio-Visual Chinese实用视听华语, andNew Practical Chinese Reader新实用汉语) a Chinese SBUs database has been generated. One hundred seventy-eight Chinese SBUs are identified, and they are categorized into ten speech act categories. Among these, the three most common speech acts are: (1) greetings/daily conversation, (2) polite request, and (3) inquiry. These speech acts represent and reflect the concept and practice of politeness in Chinese culture.Basic Spoken Chineseprovides the most detailed and clearest explanations of SBUs, and explains the most appropriate contexts for use of SBUs. As for repeated use of SBUs, bothBasic Spoken ChineseandIntegrated Chineseoutperformed the other textbooks. None of the textbooks examined, however, adequately explain the use and importance of SBUs in Modern Chinese. The purpose of this study is to fill this lacuna.

The Power of Poetry to Travel: An Interview with Mourid Barghouti

A car pulls up and the driver comes out, revealing the tall, graceful figure of one of Palestine's most important and well-known poets, Mourid Barghouti, the author of twelve books of poetry and two excellent memoirs, I Saw Ramallah (2003) and the sequel I Was Born There, I Was Born Here (2011). Barghouti's words, even if only routine greetings, are very carefully and elegantly spoken as he makes his way into the guest room and chooses the exact spot that would be his home for the next two and a half hours of this interview. The poet lights a cigarette and makes a polite request that coffee be his constant companion, but please make it alqam [bitter], he says. The conversation which follows travels from thoughts on poetry, religion, revolution, and Palestine to his son, the popular poet and scholar Tamim and Mourid Barghouti's late wife and Tamim's mother, the novelist and academic Radwa Ashour.Tahrir Hamdi The British poet W. H. Auden in his tribute to the Irish poet(TH): W. B. Yeats says makes nothing happen, but he probably meant, not immediately, because after all, a poem is not a political slogan. In your long poem, Midnight, you say:The importance of the brave intellectual minority in each and every society cannot be underestimated. And in this khaki age that we live in they are most needed. In the battle for language, silence is definitely not the answer and connivance is a crime.What can poetry do in our context? What can poetry make happen or not happen? Can poets create countries? I am saying this in the context of what has been said about the Irish poet W. B. Yeats-that he invented a country and called it Ireland.Mourid Barghouti I'll start by endorsing Auden's statement. Poetry(MB): can make nothing happen. Sometimes you feel that there is the following illusion-an audience expects that a poet writes a poem on Saturday and then the country is liberated on Sunday, or the dictator is overthrown the next day. A poem cannot liberate a street from its occupiers, cannot remove a dictator, no poetry, no poem, no poet can do that ... poetry does not work [in] this way. Poetry works slowly, on the front of the beautiful, the right, the imagination, and it works like a slow-release medicine that you take for your body; poetry works like a slow-release medicine for the mind and the soul of the receiver. It doesn't have an immediate effect, but it stays there and then it travels. Edward Said speaks about travelling theory. Poetry also travels. The word travels from one person to another, from one country to another, from one language to another, from one generation to another. That's why we could find a Tunisian teenager in a secluded room writing some lines and then he dies before he is twenty-five and then one hundred years later, the Tahrir Square in Egypt and the Bourgeba Street in Tunisia are rocking with his If the people one day will to live/then destiny must respond. The line travelled through ages, through geography, through minds, through the pages.TH: So the poem survives ...MB: The poem survives, that's why we are still reading poems that have been written thousands of years ago.TH: But it can't have an immediate effect.MB: No, no ... I want to make a difference between music and military music. Military music is not music. Military music can do immediate things, can organize the steps of the boots of the soldiers, can send some enthusiasm only at the minute the conductor is leading the band. After that everybody goes to his kitchen, everyday business ... your poem, to deserve its name, should not affect only this audience, at this minute; it should have the power to influence another audience in another age, in another place, with another background. For instance, when Yeats wrote Easter 1916 in Ireland-a terrible beauty is born, I can feel it when an act of great heroism is done in any other country, in Palestine, Ireland, Vietnam, El Salvador, Chile, so I mean, if you achieve the demands of the aesthetics of writing, then the work can survive, can acquire these two conditions of being influential outside its sphere and outside its generation, its time, time and place. …

Testing Students Through The Writing Skills

Four major skills in communicating through language are often broadly defined as listening, listening and speaking, reading and writing. In many situations where English is taught for general purposes, these skills should be carefully integrated and used to perform as many genuinely communicative tasks as possible. Where this is the case, it is important for the test writer to concentrate on those types of test items which appear directly relevant to the ability to use language for real-life communication, especially in oral interaction. Thus, questions which test the ability to understand and respond appropriately to polite request, advice, instructions, etc. would be preferred to tests of reading aloud or telling stories. In the written section of a test, questions requiring students to write letters, memos, reports and messages would be used in place of many of the more traditional compositions used in the past.

Testing the reactance vs. the reciprocity of politeness explanations for the effectiveness of the “but you are free” compliance-gaining technique

Two studies were conducted to assess whether reactance or politeness offers a better explanation of the effectiveness of the “but you are free” (BYAF) technique of gaining compliance. The first was conducted with an online survey in the US (N = 131) and found that the BYAF was associated with lower perceived freedom threat than a control or polite request. The second was a field study and collected data in France (N = 372), Norway (N = 360), and the US (N = 108) to test a 3 (direct request, polite request, or BYAF) × 2 (requester benefits or 3rd party group benefits) design. The BYAF was associated with higher compliance than the other two messages.

Politeness in ancient Rome: Can it help us evaluate modern politeness theories?

AbstractThis paper takes four frameworks for understanding linguistic politeness (Brown and Levinson, Watts, Terkourafi, Hall) and tests each on the same corpus to see whether they yield results that are useful and/or in keeping with the other information we have about the material. The corpus used consists of 661 polite requests made in letters by a single Roman author, Cicero. The results demonstrate first that politeness theories are helpful as explanatory tools even in dealing with very well-known material, and second that no one theory is best: different theories are more and less useful in answering different questions about the data. It is therefore suggested that the use of multiple frameworks will provide the best understanding of the data.

HISTORY OF THE INSTITUTE OF THE COMMISSIONER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS FORMATION IN THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION

The article is devoted to the history and principles of activities of the Commissioner for human rights in the Russian Federation. The authors examine the causes, historical challenges of the emergence of one of the most important civil society institutions in our country. The main attention is paid to the peculiarities of the political and social processes in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which first made possible the formation of public and political requests for the institutionalization of service of the Commissioner for human rights. The authors’ position is based on the deep study of international experience, primarily the history of the emergence and activities of this institution in Sweden, Finland, etc. There emphasizes the Russian specificity, activities of its government structures and public institutions, their contribution to the formation and development of the institution of the Commissioner for human rights. Noting the short duration of the existence of this institution in the Russian Federation, the authors overestimate his contribution to the establishment, development and improvement of Russian civil society. In article analyzed the fundamentals of the legislation on the Commissioner for human rights, activities of federal and regional offices in the constituent entities of the Russian Federation. The authors made suggestions for further improvement of the Institute's activities, the development of cooperation with public authorities.

Polite Request Among the Akyem Speech Community in Ghana

This paper investigates into various ways by which native speakers of the Akyem Twi dialect of the Akan Language of Ghana make polite request and how social variables such as age, gender and socio-economic status influence their request making. An ethnographic research approach to qualitative design was employed and the research participants of twenty were randomly selected using the purposive sampling technique of which their responses from the interview and the observation to the topic problem were submitted to content analysis. The findings indicate that the strategy for polite request is the indirect strategy. Comparatively, the Akyem speech community equally prefers the conventional indirect strategy as the most polite strategy of request speech act as the other speech communities in Ghana. Also, social variables such as age, gender and socio-economic status influence request making yet equal status contradicts some findings in relation to familiarity. Again, Ghanaians have one condition that warrants request which is not part of the existing one; they believe that the individual granting the request should be trustworthy. Moreover, there were new interesting findings in this study.It was foundout that non-conventional indirect strategy has some natural features which make it different from the conventional strategy and more like the direct strategy, even though they are all indirect strategies.

Indirectness in English Requests among Malay University Students

Communication serves as the main medium to connect human beings so that they can live in harmony. There are numerous ways to communicate effectively, and one of them is by making polite requests. Adopting the Discourse Completion Test (DCT), 40 questionnaires were distributed to 40 respondents from two higher learning institutions located in Selangor. The results showed that conventionally indirect strategies were preferred by students when making requests to their lecturers, and even to their friends. Therefore, the findings indicate that the Malay culture conforms to Brown and Levinson's theory on face which highlights that in order to keep either positive or negative face on FTA (Face Threatening Acts), politeness or indirectness strategies are employed.

Sprachwissenschaft als Kulturwissenschaft aus romanistischer Sicht: Das Beispiel der kontrastiven Pragmatik

One of the central questions of pragmalinguistics is the distinction between linguistic structures and cultural norms that guide the usage of these structures in verbal interaction. This distinction is especially important for contrastive pragmatics, which analyses the interfaces of different languages and cultures. In order to draw a clear line between linguistic and cultural differences in patterns of interaction, contrastive pragmatics needs a methodological framework that is centred around a precise analytical separation between the idiomatic traditions of language and the cultural traditions of verbal interaction. Based on Eugenio Coseriu’s system of language as a cultural competence, the study introduces a model that distinguishes three perspectives and types of (contrastive) pragmatics. A key-notion of this model is the concept of discourse traditions as a cultural knowledge that guides verbal interactions. Using this model as a blueprint, the study discusses discourse traditions of requesting with a focus on question acts used as polite requests. In the study, the idea of cultural traditions of discourse, which has been widely discussed in Romance linguistics during the last years, proves to be fruitful for a new methodological perspective on illocutionary patterns and communicative routines in contrastive and intercultural pragmatics.

Sprachwissenschaft als Kulturwissenschaft aus romanistischer Sicht: Das Beispiel der kontrastiven Pragmatik

One of the central questions of pragmalinguistics is the distinction between linguistic structures and cultural norms that guide the usage of these structures in verbal interaction. This distinction is especially important for contrastive pragmatics, which analyses the interfaces of different languages and cultures. In order to draw a clear line between linguistic and cultural differences in patterns of interaction, contrastive pragmatics needs a methodological framework that is centred around a precise analytical separation between the idiomatic traditions of language and the cultural traditions of verbal interaction. Based on Eugenio Coseriu’s system of language as a cultural competence, the study introduces a model that distinguishes three perspectives and types of (contrastive) pragmatics. A key-notion of this model is the concept of discourse traditions as a cultural knowledge that guides verbal interactions. Using this model as a blueprint, the study discusses discourse traditions of requesting with a focus on question acts used as polite requests. In the study, the idea of cultural traditions of discourse, which has been widely discussed in Romance linguistics during the last years, proves to be fruitful for a new methodological perspective on illocutionary patterns and communicative routines in contrastive and intercultural pragmatics.

Children's Resource Acquisition Behaviors in the Situation of Potential Conflict: A Cross-cultural Study of Chinese and Canadian 7 Years Old Children

Resources are usually limited, how can children acquire resources successfully and avoid conflict with their peer in peer interaction is an interesting and important topic in developmental psychology. It's a pity that there is little research on children's resource acquisition in either China or other countries. Cross-cultural research is even less. In the present study, we attempted to investigate resource acquisition behaviors of 7-year-old children, and compare the differences between Chinese and Canadian children on these behaviors. One hundred and sixty Chinese children and one hundred and thirty three Canadian children took part in this study. At 7 years old, 4 children who were not familiar with each other were invited to the laboratory, and the child's resource acquisition behaviors were observed as they played with a single novel toy. Statistical analyses revealed the following results:(1) Chinese children exhibited more adult seeking and spontaneous giving behaviors than Canadian children. The percentages of unsuccessful resource acquisition behaviors and resource acquisition for self of Canadian children were significantly higher than Chinese children.(2) Boys exhibited more assertive behaviors and turn taking rule behaviors than girls, and girls exhibited more spontaneous giving, leadership/organization and resource acquisition for others than boys.(3) Turn taking rule was an important non-strategy resource acquisition method.(4) Chinese children exhibited more leadership/ organization than Canadian children in group level.(5) Assertive behavior and turn taking rule were all effective resource acquisition method but not for polite verbal request.(7) Adult seeking was an effective method for Chinese boys, but not for girls and Canadian children.

Politeness as Performance – The Functions of Mbôk and Áák in Ibibio

Linguistic politeness as enunciated within the framework of Brown and Levinsonfs (1978, 1987) work proposes that utterances are either polite or impolite, and that linguistic resources serve to gencodeh politeness. This paper adopts the Rational Actor model of politeness which focuses on participantsf goals and motivation during interactions. It examines the functions of two Ibibio politeness forms, Mbok and Aak in ten naturally occurring interactive sessions. This is with a view to demonstrating that in some social and cultural contexts politeness may encompass dimensions which extend beyond positive or negative face threats. The findings indicate that in Ibibio society the politeness form .bok tends to be employed in informal contexts, while the form Aak described by Essien (1990, p.174) as a form of polite request appears to be used strategically, deployed for the preferred outcome which it can secure. The paper concludes that the choice of certain politeness forms in some socio-cultural contexts may be strategically determined by the outcome which such choice are anticipated to secure for the individual interactant.