Article published in:
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: 01 September 2010
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.20.3.05pet

Full-text

Perspective and politeness in Finnish Requests
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Cited by 5 other publications

Holttinen, Tuuli, F. Neveu, G. Bergounioux, M.-H. Côté, J.-M. Fournier, L. Hriba & S. Prévost
2016. Stratégies de requête dans un bureau de tabac et dans son équivalent finlandaisR-kioski. SHS Web of Conferences 27 ► pp. 02007 ff. Crossref logo
Isosävi, Johanna
2020. Cultural outsiders' reported adherence to Finnish and French politeness norms. Journal of Pragmatics 155 ► pp. 177 ff. Crossref logo
Isosävi, Johanna & Hanna Lappalainen
2015.  In Address Practice As Social Action: European Perspectives, ► pp. 97 ff. Crossref logo
Lappalainen, Hanna
2019.  In It’s not all about you [Topics in Address Research, 1], ► pp. 100 ff. Crossref logo
Pajusalu, Renate, Maret Kaska, Birute Klaas-Lang, Karl Pajusalu, Anu Treikelder & Virve-Anneli Vihman
2017. Characteristics of request formulation in Estonian, Finnish, French, Lithuanian and Russian . STUF - Language Typology and Universals 70:3 ► pp. 455 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 09 september 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

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