Politeness Judgments in Personal Relationships

Abstract

Brown and Levinson's politeness theory specifies five strategies for achieving politeness. Although the strategies are presented as ordered and mutually exclusive, there is reason to believe that they are neither The authors offer an alternative means of classifying requests that is grounded in the phenomenology of the social actor and depends on three message features: explicitness, dominance, and argument. Separate samples of judges viewed video clips of one college student attempting to influence another and provided judgments ofpoliteness (n = 100), explicitness and overall dominance (n = 435), linguistic dominance (n = 80), or argument (n = 60). A regression analysis predicting politeness was conducted using message as the unit of analysis. The results showed a strong, negative relationship between politeness and dominance and weaker, positive associations with explicitness and argument.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 81 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.