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This research focused on describing how perceptions about the degree of imposition are manifested in requests in Japanese used by learners and how these perceptions are translated into choices of pragmatic modification. Through qualitative methods using the discourse completion test, it is known that perceptions of the degree of an imposition when requesting something are not manifested into the choice of request type used by learners. Instead, it is more visible from the variation in the choice of syntactic patterns used in request expression. The perception of the degree of imposition translated into a choice of external and internal pragmatic modifications. Although learners have varying perceptions of the degree of imposition for the same request, it does not appear that learners differentiate the choice of pragmatic modification based on the heaviness of the request’s imposition.

This study is an attempt to examine politeness markers employed by Indonesian English teachers in classroom interactions. Purposefully chosen English teachers were observed, audio-recorded, and analyzed by using the politeness principle and Gricean cooperative principle. The conversation analysis revealed that to mitigate the illocutionary act of request, aside from using internal modifiers at most (consultative device, politeness markers, hesitators, hedges, play-downs, committers, down-toners, understaters), the teachers also used external devices as an adjunct to the head acts (grounder, sweetener, and disarmer). Besides, teachers intentionally violated the maxim for the sake of extending the talk. Further research needs to include more participants and instruments in a wider area of analysis.

Publisher Copyright: © 2021 John Benjamins Publishing Company. This study examines intersubjective development of children’s requests in home interactions of Finnish-speaking 1–5-year-old children with their caregivers, siblings and peers. Children’s early requests emerge sequentially through the caregivers’ co-construction of the children’s early vocalizations, word-gesture combinations and two-word utterances. Children’s first linguistically explicit requests, imperatives, also rely on intersubjective understanding between the child and the caregiver. Children start to use conditional verb forms and interrogatives as social adaptations for making requests to equal peers. Between one and five years, children’s requesting develops from embodied, co-constructed action to distinct linguistic formulations. Caregiver interaction supports the children’s reliance on co-participants’ co-operation in fulfilling requests whereas peer interaction enhances children’s intersubjective understanding of co-participants’ varying commitment and entitlement to grant the request.

In the Netherlands and in Belgium, a political debate emerged regarding the possibility of euthanasia and assisted suicide (EAS) for older adults who experience their lives as completed and no longer worth living, despite being relatively healthy. This mini-review aimed to (1) present an overview of the terms used to denote this phenomenon as well as their definitions and to (2) explore how the underlying experiences are interpreted by the study authors. A systematic search was performed in Web of Science, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, and CINAHL, yielding 35 articles meeting the selection criteria. We selected empirical, English-language articles published in peer-reviewed journals. Participants had to have a first-person experience of the phenomenon or be assessed for it, or have a third-person experience of the phenomenon. Results show that the terms tiredness of life (ToL) and weariness of life (WoL) were used most frequently, also in the broader literature on suicidal expressions across the life span. Many studies mentioned operational definitions or synonyms rather than theoretical definitions. Moreover, inside the EAS debate, the term ToL was more common, its definition incorporated death wishes, and it was regularly framed existentially. Outside of this debate, the phenomenon was generally considered as a part of suicidal ideation distinct from death wishes, and its experience was often associated with underlying psychopathology. We discuss the need to establish consensus definitions and conclude that only a multidimensional view may be suitable to capture the complex nature of the phenomenon. ispartof: FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY vol:12 ispartof: location:Switzerland status: published

This study investigates the types and frequency of supportive moves in Yemeni Arabic as used by female speakers in the same gender and cross gender. The respondents of the study were 336 undergraduate students from Sana’a University, aged 20-23. All of the participants are relatively homogeneous in terms of their cultural background. The data were collected by using Discourse Completion Test (DCT).The analysis of the data is based on Blum-Kulka et al’s (1989) CCSARP (Cross Cultural Speech Act Realization Project) coding scheme. The results showed that Yemeni females showed greater use of external supportive moves when interacting with females more than to males. Regarding the use of external supportive moves according to direct head act of requests and indirect head of requests, in general, female respondents in F-F, F-M interactions have a great tendency to employ external supportive moves with direct and indirect head act of requests. In other words, it was observed that female respondents convey polite request by using external supportive moves regardless of directness or indirectness.

Politeness is an indispensable topic in pragmatics. The standard of politeness may vary from group to group, from situation to situation and even from person to person. In pragmatics the principle of politeness is related to the choices that are made in the language usage, the linguistic expressions that give people space and express a friendly attitude. The present article focuses on the examination and comparison of positive and negative politeness strategies to express request in English and Armenian cultures. The analysis shows that in Armenian culture positive politeness is highlighted. On the contrary, in English culture requests are made within negative politeness strategies.

International audience; No abstract available

In the field of health communication, it is increasingly important to understand the interactional management of free choice and the demands of (good) care, especially in situations where these two objectives conflict with each other. In a multimodal interaction analysis of video recordings, this article examines decision-making processes in which a caretaker refuses to retrieve a requested object for a woman living with acquired brain injury during their weekly shopping trip. The multimodal analysis describes both the sequential unfolding of these assisted shopping interactions and the interplay of multimodal resources used by the participants. The analysis demonstrates how choice is made available, despite communication impairments, and how the participants deal with the potential loss of face resulting from the caretaker’s rejections.

Publisher Copyright: © 2021 John Benjamins Publishing Company. This chapter examines multilingual interactions where bilingual participants engage in advancing mutual understanding between other participants by language brokering (e.g. Bolden 2012) requests and offers from Finnish to Brazilian Portuguese. Brokering turns involve either (i) declarative statements regarding the prior speaker’s volition towards the requested/offered matter or (ii) questions concerning the recipient’s volition. The use of these formats displays the broker’s intersubjective interpretation of locally relevant features of the action, such as the distribution of benefits and agency, and contingencies in its realization. The investigation of language brokering in this context also contributes to research on requests, offers and related social actions (e.g. Couper-Kuhlen 2014), action ascription (Levinson 2013; Deppermann & Haugh forthcoming), and on verbs expressing volition (Sacks 1992: 181; Schulze-Wenck 2005).

Over the last three decades, a growing number of studies have investigated the effects of instruction on the acquisition of pragmatic features in L2. The bulk of this research has focused mainly on the teaching of English as a second/foreign language. However, instructional pragmatic studies in L2-Russian are lacking. The main purpose of our study is to contribute towards filling this gap by analysing the effects of pragmatic instruction on the acquisition of two speech acts by Italian learners of Russian. Furthermore, we aim to explore whether the Multimodal Russian Corpus (MURCO), a multimedia subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus, can be an effective tool for teaching speech acts in L2-Russian. Our research was composed of one experimental group (n = 18) and one control group (n = 11); each was composed of two intact classes of Italian university students at an intermediate level of L2-Russian, who were pre- and post-tested using a written discourse completion task. The experimental group was subjected to a programme of pragmatic instruction – eight thirty-minute MURCO-based lessons devoted to requests and advice, while the control group was taught according to the standard syllabus, that is, with no pragmatic instruction. The results revealed that the use of the target pragmatic features varied significantly in the experimental group, but not in the control group, thus showing a general positive effect of the instructional treatment based on the MURCO corpus. However, some limitations were identified with regard to the usability of this tool by teachers and learners.

To investigate the experience of psychiatrists who completed assessment procedures of euthanasia requests from adults with psychiatric conditions (APC) over the last 12 months. Between November 2018 and April 2019 a cross-sectional survey was sent to a sample of 753 psychiatrists affiliated with Belgian organisations of psychiatrists to gather detailed information on their latest experience with a completed euthanasia assessment procedure, irrespective of its outcome (i.e. euthanasia being performed or not). Information on 46 unique cases revealed that most APC suffered from comorbid psychiatric and/or somatic disorders, and had received different kinds of treatment for many years prior to their euthanasia request. Existential suffering was the main reason for the request. The entire procedure spanned an average of 14 months, and an average of 13.5 months in the 23 cases that culminated in the performance of euthanasia. In all cases, the entire procedure entailed multidisciplinary consultations, including with family and friends. Psychiatrists reported fewer difficulties in assessing due care criteria related to the APC’s self-contemplation – for example, unbearable suffering on top of the due care criteria related to their medical condition; incurability due to lack of reasonable treatment perspectives. In a few cases in which euthanasia was the outcome, not all legal criteria were fulfilled in the reporting physicians’ opinions. Both positive and negative experiences of the assessment procedure were reported: for example, reduced suicide risk for the APC; an emotional burden and a feeling of being pressured for the psychiatrist. This study confirms that euthanasia assessment in APC entails a lengthy process with diverse complexities, and psychiatrists require support in more than one respect if the assessments are to be handled adequately. Thorough evaluation of current guidelines is recommended: that is, to what extent the guidelines sufficiently address the complexities around (e.g.) assessing legal criteria or involving relatives. We formulate various avenues for further research to build on this study’s insights and to fill remaining knowledge gaps.

This study aimed to explore the refusal strategies used by Saudi English as a foreign language (EFL) undergraduate students as well as to examine the relationship of these strategies to social status in the situations of request, invitation, offer, and suggestion. It provided an answer to the research question, what are the strategies used by EFL undergraduate students when performing the speech act of refusal and whether these strategies vary according to status in the situations of request, invitation, offer, and suggestion? The participants were 150 Saudi EFL students. Data were derived using a discourse completion task. It was composed of three request situations, three invitation situations, three offer situations, and three suggestion situations. Each of those situations consisted of a refusal to a person of a higher status, another one for a person of equal status, and finally one for a person of a lower status. Beebe et al. (1990) taxonomy was selected as the most comprehensive one for the analysis of refusal strategies. The results indicated that the most popular refusal strategies the participants used were the indirect ones, followed by the direct ones and then by adjuncts. The results also revealed that the participants refused differently in each of the four types of situations. On the other hand, the results showed that social status has no significant influence on their use of refusal strategies. Based on these findings, some recommendations for the integration of pragmatic teaching were suggested to foster pragmatic competence among undergraduate students

BackgroundUnbearable suffering is a key criterion in legally granting patients' euthanasia requests in Belgium yet a generally accepted definition of unbearable suffering remains elusive. The ability to understand and assess unbearable suffering is essential, particularly in patients with psychiatric conditions, as the underlying causes of these conditions are not always apparent. To enable research into when and why suffering experiences incite patients with psychiatric conditions to request euthanasia, and to help explore preventive and curative perspectives, the development of an assessment instrument is needed.AimsTo improve the cognitive validity of a large initial item pool used to assess the nature and extent of suffering in patients with psychiatric conditions.MethodCognitive validity was established via two rounds of cognitive interviews with patients with psychiatric conditions with (n = 9) and without (n = 5) euthanasia requests.ResultsDuring the first round of cognitive interviews, a variety of issues relating to content, form and language were reported and aspects that were missing were identified. During the second round, the items that had been amended were perceived as sufficiently easily to understand, sensitive to delicate nuances, comprehensive and easy to answer accurately. Neither research topic nor method were perceived as emotionally strenuous, but instead as positive, relevant, comforting and valuable.ConclusionsThis research resulted in an item pool that covers the concept of suffering more adequately and comprehensively. Further research endeavours should examine potential differences in suffering experiences over time and in patients with psychiatric conditions with and without euthanasia requests. The appreciation patients demonstrated regarding their ability to speak extensively and openly about their suffering and wish to die further supports the need to allow patients to speak freely and honestly during consultations.Declaration of interestsNone.

Studies investigating compliance-gaining procedures have shown that the feeling that someone is free to comply or not with a request is a requirement to obtain compliance. In this study, participants were asked for money for a charitable organization. In the experimental condition, people first heard a sentence saying that they would probably refuse to help, and then they were asked to make a donation. In the control condition, participants were just asked for money. Findings showed that more participants complied with the request in the experimental condition. Reactance theory was used to explain these results.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the interaction between cognition and emotion in the process of language modelling in the presence of social power. Cognition is related to mental behavior which an individual usually uses by problem solving. Emotions represent expressive factors such as compliments/sweeteners, intensificators etc. In our case, it is a simulation of global processing of language information by a broad categorizer during social problem solving. The research was carried out at the university and 148 students took part. The results indicate that the ‘broad categorizer” uses compliments, pre-sequences, politeness factors and their combinations in situations with social distance and power. On the other hand, in situations with social proximity and power, he/she uses language models with politeness factors, intensificators and post-sequences/supporting details.

The paper focuses on language processing and its production depending on emotions, particularly on expressive factors of the ‘narrow’ categorizer. The aim of this research is to discover how the emotions of the ‘narrow’ categorizer affect the selection of expressive factors in request formation (L1) in social situations (social distance/proximity with/without social power). The research was conducted at the university and 148 students participated. The results indicate a low extent of emotional factorś selection and their combinations by “narrow” categorizers during request formation in the mother tongue. The research confirmed our assumption that emotions of the ‘narrow’ categorizer affect language processing and request formation in dependence on social situation.

The objective of the research was to investigate the improvement of critical reading skills in reading by the English students through reciprocal questioning (ReQuest). The respondents consisted of 25 students from the VII grade in 2017/2018 academic year. The data were collected through reading tests, observation, and interview. The result indicated that the application of reciprocal questioning strategy significantly improve the critical reading ability of the students as reflected in pre-test and post-test in cycle 1 and cycle 2: 9.8; 16.04; and 17.64. The findings were supported by the respondents’ positive attitudes as reflected in the interviews.

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is often described as being characterised by a uniform pragmatic impairment. However, recent evidence suggests that some areas of pragmatic functioning are preserved. This study seeks to determine to which extent context-based derivation of non-linguistically encoded meaning is functional in ASD. We compare the performance of 24 adults with ASD, and matched neuro-typical adults in two act-out pragmatic tasks. The first task examines generation of indirect request interpretations, and the second the comprehension of irony. Intact contextual comprehension of indirect requests contrasts with marked difficulties in understanding irony. These results suggest that preserved pragmatics in ASD is limited to egocentric processing of context, which does not rely on assumptions about the speaker’s mental states., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

This study focuses on the request strategies used by the main character (Leigh Anne Tuohy and Sean Junior) in the movie The Blind Side. The writer applies the main theory of request strategies by Trosborg to conduct the research. The writer used qualitative approach, because the researcher used interpretive framework and describes the data. Leigh Anne Tuohy and Sean Junior utterances are the data source which contains request strategies. Afterwards, the writer describes the situation and condition of the main character when he/ she giving request to someone. Thus, the writer can differentiate request strategies used by female and male character. Furthermore, the writer gets the result of request strategies types in the movie The Blind Side, whereas there are ten request strategies used by female character and seven request strategies used by male character.

International audience; This study examined the pique technique associated with a reframing sentence. Passersby in the street were asked for money, either for a common amount of change (control) or 37 cents (pique technique). In half of the cases, the requester added a direct reframing sentence at the end of the request. Results showed that the pique technique increased compliance with the request. Adding a reframing sentence to the pique did not increase compliance rate with the request but increased the amount of money given by the participants. These results support the theoretical explanation that a reframing sentence could reduce the influence of the script of refusal activated by the money request.

Objective: This study assessed a new Speech Generating Device (SGD) for supporting request responses in five participants with intellectual and multiple disabilities.Methods: The technology involved a smartphone, a series of mini objects or of cardboard chips with pictures, and special software. When the participants placed one of the mini objects or chips with pictures (that they carried at their waist) against the smartphone (that they had at their chest), the smartphone emitted a verbal request concerning the activity indicated by the mini object or chip. The study was carried out according to a non-concurrent multiple baseline design across participants using sessions of 20 min.Results: During the baseline, the participants’ mean frequencies of requests were zero or close to zero. Following the 11–15 intervention sessions, all participants were successful in making requests (i.e. their mean request frequencies were between about five and 12 per session). Three participants showed clear preferences (i....

International audience; We examined the pique technique with a new form of solicitation. Passersby in the street were asked to participate in a short survey. Participants were asked if they had a little time to spare to answer a survey (control) or asked if they had 37 s to participate (pique). Results showed that the pique increased compliance. Participants who accepted were asked the reason for their compliance. It was found that the number of no reason explanations (i.e., “I don’t know”) increased in the pique condition, supporting the assumption that the pique disrupts the script of refusal.

The issue of EFL teachers� rating criteria and patterns in Interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) assessment is new and needs rigorous analysis. The purpose of this study was to reveal important variables such as raters� criteria and rating patterns by analyzing the ILP assessment process of Iranian non-native English speaking raters (NNESRs) of both high and low proficiency levels based on the request speech act. The data for this study was collected through a discourse completion test (DCT) and a rating questionnaire from 40 Iranian EFL teachers and were later analyzed through descriptive analysis-test and chi-squares. The results showed that raters considered 9 criteria, including pragma-linguistic and socio-pragmatic components of language which raters noted differently through eight request situations. The results showed that raters considered nine criteria, including pragma linguistic and socio-pragmatic components of language which were noted differently through eight request situations. Among the considered criteria, the highest frequencies belonged to the criteria of authenticity, query of preparatory and softness, and interlocutors� relationship used by high proficiency teachers, whereas low proficiency teachers used the highest frequencies of accuracy, style, and directness. The result of the study can have important connotations for teachers to consider teaching L2 pragmatics in language classes and in teacher training courses.Keywords: Interlanguage pragmatics; request; speech act; pragmatic assessment.

This study set out to find out to what extent English language learners at TOBB University of Economics and Technology Preparatory School in Ankara, Turkey can perform strategies of three specific speech acts, i.e. requests, refusals and complaints and to check these speech acts in the coursebooks used. Data was collected from 90 students with a discourse completion task and their eleven coursebooks were also evaluated. The results of the DCT demonstrated that the learners were able to perform requests and refusals more or less while their complaints were not completely appropriate and that majority of the answers lacked variety in all three speech acts. The frequency of requests in the books was not problematic, the refusals and complaints were barely included in most of them. The coursebooks also had a paucity of various strategies. (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

International audience; The “but you are free” (BYAF) technique is a verbal compliance procedure which solicits people to comply with a request by telling them that they are free to accept or to refuse the request. This technique is based on the semantic evocation of freedom. In two studies, we explored another operationalization of this paradigm: the word “liberty” or a “Statue of Liberty” picture on the experimenter's clothes. The data showed that the word liberty printed on a t-shirt produced the BYAF effect whereas the Statue of Liberty picture did not. These results provide some evidence consistent with using reactance and commitment theories to explain the paradigm, contrary to other theoretical interpretations proposed in the literature such as politeness and reciprocity theories.

Although abundant negotiation research has examined outcome frames, little is known about the procedural framing of negotiation proposals (i.e., offering my vs. requesting your resources). In a series of 8 experiments, we tested the prediction that negotiators would show a stronger concession aversion and attain better individual outcomes when their own resource, rather than the counterpart's, is the accentuated reference resource in a transaction. First, senders of proposals revealed a stronger concession aversion when they offered their own rather than requested the counterpart's resources- both in buyer-seller (Experiment 1a) and in classic transaction negotiations (Experiment 2a). Expectedly, this effect reversed for recipients: When receiving requests rather than offers, recipients experienced a stronger concession aversion in buyer-seller (Experiment 1b) and transaction negotiations (Experiment 2b). Experiments 3-5 investigated procedural frames in the interactive process of negotiations-with elementary schoolchildren (Experiment 3), in a buyer-seller context (Experiments 4a and 4b), and in a computer-mediated transaction negotiation void of buyer and seller roles (Experiment 5). In summary, 8 experiments showed that negotiators are more concession averse and claim more individual value when negotiation proposals are framed to highlight their own rather than the counterpart's resources. © 2015 American Psychological Association.

Request is a face-threatening act (FTA) that requires the ability of the speaker not only in the language itself, but also in applying the language used in its context. One of the social dimensions, named social distance, proposed by Holmes (2001), is found to be given its influence in the use of request. In this study, the writers wanted to know about request strategies spoken by Margaret Tate (a leader) to Andrew Paxton (her assistant) before and after their contract marriage, as seen in The Proposal movie. The writer used qualitative approach supported by quantitative data. The findings of this research show that in general, there are some similarities and differences of the use of request strategies before as well as after the contract marriage. In general, it can be assumed that Margaret's higher social status is giving more influences to the requests spoken to Andrew rather than the social distance itself.Keywords: Request, Request Strategies, Social Distance

International audience; Research found that mimicry behavior led to increased helping behavior toward the mimicker and is associated with higher positive evaluation of the mimicker. Furthermore, studies on helping behavior focused only on implicit helping behavior, whereas no experimental study on explicit helping request was tested. An experiment was carried out in which a female student-confederate mimicked or not mimicked a participant during a discussion about paintings and, after that, solicited the participant for a written feedback about an essay. It was found that mimicry increased compliance to the confederate's request.

This study aims to show that a distinguishing feature of interactions in small shops in France is the very large number of polite formulae, which seek to “polish” and soften the transactional process. Having briefly presented the descriptive model employed (a “Brown et Levinson revisited” model), the author describes the main forms of politeness to be found in this type of situation: opening and closing rituals, and the formulation of requests and thanks. The study is based on corpora recorded in different small shops in the town of Lyons. The author concludes with some comments of an intercultural nature

This paper reports the findings of a study designed to investigate the notion of indirectness in the speech act of requests among native speakers of Iranian Turkish. 180 respondents took a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) with ten scenarios, and returned 1800 requestive speech acts. The acts were then analyzed according to the directness categories introduced by Blum-Kulka et al. (1984) and politeness strategies suggested by Brown and Levinson (1987) . Results, after analyses of the data indicated that Blum-Kulka's scale and Brown and Levinson's classification are not complete to measure all the responses made by this study informants. There seems to be a considerable number of informants who have deliberately chosen strategies which are not in Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) and Brown and Levinson (1987) . At the end, a finer scale has been introduced by the authors to overcome the mentioned shortcomings.

This study indicates how request speech acts are formulated with regard to the face needs of Persian male native speakers. To this end, the respective request speech acts were collected through the administration of a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) which also facilitated the assessment of such contextual variables as social dominance, social distance and imposition of a request. The analysis of the data resulted in the categorization and tabulation of universal and culture-specific request strategies performed by Persian males. The data was also analyzed to reveal the interaction between contextual variables and Persian males’ linguistic choice as far as request speech acts are concerned.

The present study examines the impact of focused tasks on the development of Iranian EFL learners’ pragmatic competence. To this end, the researchers devised the dictogloss (DIG) as a written output-based task to explicitly raise learners’ awareness of the requestive downgraders. The researchers also administered the recast feedback during an oral output-based task to implicitly raise learners’ awareness of the target features. Prior to the experiment, 147 Iranian EFL learners and 43 American native English speakers were asked to participate in the study to help the researchers develop the instruments. To carry out the study, the researchers matched 60 Iranian EFL learners in two groups based on their scores on the Oxford Placement Test (2004). The groups were then randomly assigned to instructional conditions, namely the DIG task and the recast. Findings demonstrated that participants in both tasks preformed significantly better in the immediate and delayed posttests than in the pretest. The results also revealed that neither the effects of instructional treatment nor the effects of time were significant between the groups on the perception and production measures. Similarly, participants in both groups maintained the positive effects of the treatment in the delayed posttest on the same measures. For the recognition measure, although the effects of treatment were marginally significant in favor of the participants in the DIG task, they could not maintain the positive effects of treatment in the delayed posttest. This rendered the effect of time non-significant on this measure.

Communication serves as the main medium to connect human beings so that they can live in harmony. There are numerous ways to communicate effectively, and one of them is by making polite requests. Adopting the Discourse Completion Test (DCT), 40 questionnaires were distributed to 40 respondents from two higher learning institutions located in Selangor. The results showed that conventionally indirect strategies were preferred by students when making requests to their lecturers, and even to their friends. Therefore, the findings indicate that the Malay culture conforms to Brown and Levinson's theory on face which highlights that in order to keep either positive or negative face on FTA (Face Threatening Acts), politeness or indirectness strategies are employed.

Letter concerning the services of a member of the State Board of Education for the San Pete teachers' institute meetings.

Letter concerning a position in horticulture and botany at Utah Agricultural College, copies given to J. C. Blair, J. L. Snyder, and L. H. Bailey.