Conventionalized Politeness in Russian Requests: A Pragmatic View of Indirectness

Negative politeness & indirectness in Russian requests are analyzed & compared with English counterparts, based on John R. Searle's categories of indirect request sentences ("Indirect Speech Acts" in Syntax and Semantics. Vol. 3: Speech Acts, New York: Academic Press, 1975). Requests are described in terms of a relative politeness scale, & sharp differences are found between English & Russian strategies for marking illocutionary force - especially in the Russian use of utterances questioning the hearer's ability to act, in which the use of negative & interrogative particles communicates a tone of deference. A set of 14 Russian utterances located on a continuum between prototypically interrogative & prototypically imperative sentences was presented to Muscovite informants (N = 10 females & 5 males) who ranked the utterances for relative politeness & provided commentary. Equivalent Czech & Polish surface structures were presented to Czech & Polish informants (N = 2 each). Effects of intonation, rhematic dislocations, & aspect shift were observed in the Ss' interpretations, many of which varied with hypothetical contexts &/or stressed a need for supplementary hedges. Syntactic & aspectual markings received different interpretations from Czech & Polish Ss. It is concluded that Russian has greater variety of available combinations than English for the formulation of indirect requests, the perceived politeness levels of which are culture-specific. 18 References. J. Hitchcock