The Art of Requesting: Politeness and Indirectness in English and German

This study investigates the perception and production of request strategies in American English and German. It is a modified replication of Blum-Kulka’s (1987) study on indirectness and politeness in requests. In this book, data was collected from speakers of American English and German, and comparisons were made regarding their perception and choice of request strategies in six different scenarios, using a data collection method similar to a DCT (discourse completion test). The scenarios varied according to the extralinguistic variables power and social distance. The results indicate that there are some significant differences between American English and German speakers in how they perceive the politeness of different request strategies, although the results on production do not reflect the same pattern.

Vienna Thiele is a doctoral student and research assistant in English linguistics at the English Department of Leibniz University Hannover. Her research focuses on intercultural pragmatics.