Politeness Strategies in Request Among Ga Learners of English

Rebecca Akpanglo-Nartey

Abstract


This study examines the use of politeness strategies in request by young learners of English in Ghana as they communicate with their peers and also their teachers. It aims at unearthing the strategies children mostly use when they have to make a request. The assumption is that the children use both positive and negative politeness strategies to make requests among themselves and with their teachers. The participants were asked to role-play requests based on scenarios that focused on different power relations, social distance, and cost of imposition.

Keywords


Power relations;Ghana; Social distance; Cost of imposition; Role-play; Requests; Communicate

Full Text:

PDF

References


Blum-Kulka, S., & Olshtain, E. (1984). Requests and apologies: A cross-cultural study of speech act realization patterns (CCCARP). Applied Linguistics, 5(3), 196-213.

Blum-Kulka, S. (1980). Learning to say what you mean in a second language: a study of the speech act performance of learners of Hebrew as a second language. Applied Linguistics, 3, 29-59.

Brown, P., & Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brown, P. (2015). Politeness and Language. International Encyclopaedia of Social and Behavioural Sciences (2nd ed., Vol.18). Elsevier Ltd.

Chen, R. (2001). Self-politeness: A proposal. Journal of Pragmatics, 33, 87-106.

Dittrich, W. H., Johansen, T., & Kulinskaya, E. (2011). Norms and situational rules of address in English and Norwegian speakers. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(15), 3807-3821.

Eebe, L., Takahashi, T., & Uliss-Weltz, R. (1985). Pragmatic transfer in ESL refusals. In R. Scarcella, E. Andersen & S. Krashen (Eds,), On the development of communicative competence in a second language (pp.55-73). Rowley, MA: Newbury House.

Ho, D. Y. F. (1976). On the concept of face. American Journal of Sociology, 66, 867-884.

Lakoff, R. (1973). The logic of politeness; or minding your p’s and q’s. Papers from the Ninth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society, 292-305.

Meier, A. J. (1995). Defining politeness: Universality in appropriateness. Language Sciences, 17(4), 345-356.

Meyerhoff, M. (2011). Introducing sociolinguistics (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.

Salvesen, K. E. (2015). Politeness strategies in requests by norwegian learners of English in comparison with native speakers of English. Hawaii Pacific University TESOL Working Paper Series, 13, 53-69.

Trosborg, A. (1995). Interlanguage pragmatics: Requests, complaints and apologies. Berlin, New York: Mouton Gruyter.

Watts, R. J. (2003). Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Watts, R. (1989). Relevance and relational work: Linguistic politeness as linguistic behaviour. Multilingua, 8(2-3), 131-166.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/9542

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2017 Rebecca Atchoi Akpanglo-Nartey, Rebecca Atchoi Akpanglo-Nartey

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Share us to:   


 

Online Submissionhttp://cscanada.org/index.php/sll/submission/wizard


Reminder

How to do online submission to another Journal?

If you have already registered in Journal A, then how can you submit another article to Journal B? It takes two steps to make it happen:

1. Register yourself in Journal B as an Author

Find the journal you want to submit to in CATEGORIES, click on “VIEW JOURNAL”, “Online Submissions”, “GO TO LOGIN” and “Edit My Profile”. Check “Author” on the “Edit Profile” page, then “Save”.

2. Submission

Go to “User Home”, and click on “Author” under the name of Journal B. You may start a New Submission by clicking on “CLICK HERE”.


We only use three mailboxes as follows to deal with issues about paper acceptance, payment and submission of electronic versions of our journals to databases: caooc@hotmail.com; sll@cscanada.net; sll@cscanada.org

 Articles published in Studies in Literature and Language are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY).

 STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE Editorial Office

Address: 1055 Rue Lucien-L'Allier, Unit #772, Montreal, QC H3G 3C4, Canada.
Telephone: 1-514-558 6138 
Website: Http://www.cscanada.net; Http://www.cscanada.org 
E-mailoffice@cscanada.net; office@cscanada.org; caooc@hotmail.com

Copyright © 2010 Canadian Academy of Oriental and Occidental Culture