Directives and politeness in SPICE-Ireland

Abstract

Working from the perspective of Leech’s (The Pragmatics of Politeness. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014) modification to Blum-Kulka et al.’s (Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies. Norwood, NJ, Ablex, 1989) approach to classifying requests, this study investigates how far impositive directive speech acts are found in spoken Irish English, a variety of English which is well-known for avoiding face threats. The study further investigates how these impositive speech acts are influenced by the genre of the spoken category. In order to do so, this study uses data from the southern component of SPICE-Ireland, a pragmatically annotated corpus of spoken Irish English, and analyses data from six different genres of spoken conversation: Broadcast discussions, Business transactions, Classroom discussions, Face-to-face conversations, Legal presentations and Telephone conversations. These genres are classified in terms of the concepts of ‘language of distance’ versus ‘language of immediacy’. In the data, impositive strategies are frequently found, particularly so in private settings of ‘language of immediacy’. In the more public and formal settings of ‘language of distance’, by contrast, indirect strategies are more prominent.