Universiatatea Vasile Alecsandri Bacau

Pragmatica discursului

BACAU 2012

Universiatatea Vasile Alecsandri Bacau Facultatea de Litere, Master LEPC

Request

Diana Robu

2012

Topic: Request Task: Ask someone to give you your book back. Age: between 13 and 14 years Number of respondents: 24 Method of work: I distributed a sheet of paper with the task to the respondents. Participation was voluntary and anonymously. The respondents were asked to give one one answer for each variant.

Expression

Number of choices
(a) (b) 4 3 12 0

%
(a) 21% 0 0 29% (b) 17% 12% 50%

Can you give me my book please? Could you give me my book back? Could you give me my book back, please? I want my book, please!

5 0 0 7

Would you mind giving me back my book?

Give me my book, please! I wonder if you could give me my book back. Excuse me, I want my book back! Could you hand me my book?

0
5 0 3 4

5
0 0 0 0

0
21% 0 12% 17%

21%
0 0 0 0

Conclusion As a conclusion we can notice that the greater the social distance between the interlocutors is the more politeness is generally expected. The greater the relative powerof hearer over speaker, the more politeness is recommended. We have seen the different ways of requesting a book from different persons depending on the social distance and applying different degrees of politeness.

Bibliography:
E. Bonta, Curs Pragmatica discursului (PPT),
Universitatea Vasile Alescandri, Bacau, 2012 Levinson, Pragmatics, Cambridge University Press, 1983 Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson, Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage Cambridge University Press, 1987 http://online.sfsu.edu/~kbach/spchacts.html