This paper provides some (more) insights into cross-cultural variation in speech act realization by analyzing English, German, Polish and Russian requests. It aims to shows that the relationship between indirectness and politeness is interpreted differently across cultures. Hence, the analysis focuses on the difference between direct requests, which have been said to play a central role in Polish and Russian, and conventionally indirect requests, which are the most frequent request type in English and German. It further shows that the examined languages exhibit culture-specific preferences for syntactic and lexical downgraders modifying the illocutionary force of the request and, thus, reducing the threat to the hearer's face.The requests analyzed in this study have been elicited by means of a discourse completion task and constitute responses to a scenario frequently used in previous request studies, so that the results can be compared with those established for other languages. The strong agreement among languages on the use of conventional indirectness in this scenario allows for testing the restricted applicability of interrogative constructions claimed for the two Slavic languages.

This book investigates how speakers of English, Polish and Russian deal with offensive situations. It reveals culture-specific perceptions of what counts as an apology and what constitutes politeness. It offers a critical discussion of Brown and Levinson's theory and provides counterevidence to the correlation between indirectness and politeness underlying their theory. Their theory is applied to two languages that rely less heavily on indirectness in conveying politeness than does English, and to a speech act that does not become more polite through indirectness. An analysis of the face considerations involved in apologising shows that in contrast to disarming apologies, remedial apologies are mainly directed towards positive face needs, which are crucial for the restoration of social equilibrium and maintenance of relationships. The data show that while English apologies are characterised by a relatively strong focus on both interlocutors’ negative face, Polish apologies display a particular concern for positive face. For Russian speakers, in contrast, apologies seem to involve a lower degree of face threat than they do in the other two languages.

We compare the use of two formats for requesting an object in informal everyday interaction: imperatives, common in our Polish data, and second-person polar questions, common in our English data. Imperatives and polar questions are selected in the same interactional "home environments" across the languages, in which they enact two social actions: drawing on shared responsibility and enlisting assistance, respectively. Speakers across the languages differ in their choice of request format in "mixed" interactional environments that support either. The finding shed light on the orderly ways in which cultural diversity is grounded in invariants of action formation.[Supplementary materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Research on Language and Social Interaction for the following free supplemental resource(s): subtitled video clips of the analysed object request sequences.] Speakers of different languages have different grammatical habits when it comes to formulating requests, but what is the sociocultural significanc of this? We address this question in an investigation of the most common turn formats for requesting an object among English and Polish family and friends. In a collection of over 200 object request sequences, we fin that these are formatted predominantly as imperatives (podaj pieprz/"pass the pepper") in the Polish interactions, and predominantly as polar questions with a modal auxiliary in the second person (can youWe would like to thank the editor of ROLSI and three anonymous reviewers for making very helpful suggestions in the course of bringing this work to publication.

The present study demonstrates that language-specific grammatical resources can afford speakers language-specific ways of organising cooperative practical action. On the basis of video-recordings of Polish families in their homes, we describe action affordances of the Polish impersonal modal declarative construction trzeba x ('one needs to x') in the accomplishment of everyday domestic activities, such as cutting bread, bringing recalcitrant children back to the dinner table, or making phone calls. Trzeba x-turns in first position are regularly chosen by speakers to point to a possible action as an evident necessity for the furthering of some broader ongoing activity. Such turns in first position provide an environment in which recipients can enact shared responsibility by actively involving themselves in the relevant action. Treating the necessity as not restricted to any particular subject, aligning responsive actions are oriented to when the relevant action will be done, not whether it will be done. We show that such sequences are absent from English interactions by analysing (a) grammatically similar turn formats in English interaction ("we need to x", "the x needs to y"), and (b) similar interactive environments in English interactions. We discuss the potential of this research to point to a new avenue for researchers interested in the relationship between language diversity and diversity in human action and cognition. Acknowledgments:We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their detailed and helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. We also want to thank Alan Costall, Alessandra Fasulo, Giovanni Rossi, Matylda Weidner, and Katarzyna Zinken for their feedback on earlier versions of the paper.