Politeness Behavior in Requests as a Function of Downgrading

Politeness Behavior in Requests as a Function of Downgrading

  This paper examined Korean students’ ability to express politeness in various facethreatening situations requiring the performance of the speech act of requests. As one important aspect of pragmatic competence, politeness in the paper was viewed as a function of downgrading which plays an important role in mitigating the imposititve force of face-threatening acts, and considering saving others’ face. In a study in which data were collected via discourse completion test (DCT), three language groups (EFL Korean learners, ESL Korean learners and English native speakers) were asked to read the description of each one of the six situations in DCT, perceive a need for politeness in each situation, and write down what they would be most likely to say in a given situation. The analysis of written data on both subjects’ perception of a need for politeness and their requests across situations showed that three language groups did not differ from each other in their perception of politeness needs throughout situations. However, when it comes to the actual realization of politeness through the use of downgraders, great differences existed among the groups. The native speaker group used much more downgraders within requests by combining one downgrader with another from various types of downgraders than the two learner groups who relied mainly on a few types of dowmgraders, showed a limited repertoire of downgraders, and thus suffered from the lack of politeness in every one of the situations. Such a pragmatic deficiency was more pronounced in the EFL learner group than the ESL learner group. Based on the findings of the study, some teaching suggestions were offered to help students to become pragmatically competent L2 users as far as English linguistic politeness is concerned.