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Pragmatics
Vol. 20:3 (2010) ► pp.401–423

Perspective and politeness in Finnish Requests

This study makes use of elicited request speech act data in Finnish to view variability of personal perspective and T/V forms across a variety of situations. The speakers exhibited a great deal of congruency when they were scripted as addressing someone familiar, being in a position of equal or higher status than the interlocutor, and when the request was considered a low imposition. In such situations, speakers tended to use a second person perspective, with informal T/V forms. The Finnish T-forms were found to be the default form, showing up in half of the request utterances. The Finnish V-forms showed up in only 10 percent of the requests. A variationist analysis using Varbrul complemented the main findings, but was found to not be a reliable tool for elicited pragmatic data, using sociopragmatic factors as independent variables.
Keywords: Perspective, Forms of address, Speech acts, Requests, Finnish, Pragmatic variation
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 1 September 2010
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https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.20.3.05pet
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