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In this paper, we investigate evidence of diachronic variation in patterns of Discernment Politeness in letters written in the ancient Egyptian Old Kingdom (c. 2300–2200 bce) and Late Ramesside period (c. 1099–1069 bce). We present examples of requests, information acts and honorifics used in these letters, predominantly those letters sent by subordinates to their superiors, to explore how this relationship dynamic is linguistically indexed. Our evidence shows that throughout the Old and New Kingdoms, communicative acts were regulated by behavioural norms dependent on power structures rather than individual volition, with Power being the most dominant social variable. Finally, we argue that Discernment is a key approach for exploring politeness in texts from ancient Egypt, supporting current research on the topic, and that the approach used here for the ancient Egyptian material has wider applicability for diachronic linguistic analyses of remote civilisations which are highly hierarchical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study applies House's (1996, 2005) dimensions of cross-cultural differences as a diagnostic tool to investigate regional variation regarding two pragmalinguistic requestive patterns with may in Scottish and English non-private letters (1500 to 1700). The dimensional scheme proves a useful tool for explaining similarities and differences in the requestive behaviour in the two varieties. It is shown that, in the sixteenth century, grounders with may are part of a set of downgrading devices employed by letter-writers to counteract the directness and self-orientation particularly of performative requests in both the Scottish and the English correspondence. Moreover, the dimensional analysis explicates the cross-varietal differences regarding may in the seventeenth century correspondence by linking the rise of mitigating may in performative requests in the Scottish letters to the increased self-orientation towards the letter-writer, which is not counter-balanced by other downgraders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study elucidates how speakers of different cultures, namely, Saudi Arabia and United States employ the speech act of requesting, drawing upon various politeness features. It conducted a qualitative analysis to offer explanations for different strategies of requests used by both groups and how they employ politeness features. The present study also conducted small statistics (frequencies and percentages) to explore the most and least common strategies that were used by participants in this study. The sample of this study included 20 Saudis and 20 Americans who were students at Southern Illinois University. The findings revealed that while Saudi participants used more direct strategies than their American counterparts, these direct strategies were characterized as positive politeness. That is, Saudi participants relied on directness feature to minimize the social distance with the addressee. However, American students were more formal than their Saudi counterparts, suggesting that they were less direct when they made requests. But this type of directness is negative as it doesn’t aim at removing social borders between interlocutors. This study indicates that Saudis tend to be more informal (and hence less indirect) than Americans when they make requests. The present study demonstrates that culture is a key social factor to determine how this speech act is employed by speakers of different cultures. It can thus be argued that directness has social implications as it plays an important role in eliminating social borders and minimizing social distance between the interlocutors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a description of request for confirmation (RfC) sequences in everyday conversation in Egyptian Arabic. Through a quantitative analysis of 200 sequences excerpted from telephone calls, the analysis is concerned to identify the main design features of RfC sequences and their context-sensitive distribution and use. Analysis reveals that RfCs in Egyptian Arabic often do not bear special syntactic or prosodic marking. Lexical devices, such as inference markers, tag questions, and modulation markers, make explicit the specific epistemic position of the requesters. RfCs mostly attract confirmations. These can be accomplished by minimal responses; however, in most cases, a more elaborate format is used. Greater epistemic independence is suggested in confirmations in which no token is used. Non-minimal responses seem to be normative in the case of disconfirmations. Responders can also employ dedicated means for declining to provide a dis/confirmation. The findings of this study support the view of RfC sequences as a complex site for the display and negotiation of knowledge and social positioning.

This paper offers an analysis of the organizational features of passing food objects as a commonplace embodied social practice to accomplish requests to another to taste food during joint cooking activities. Situated within the cognate frameworks of Conversation Analysis and Ethnomethodology, the sequential, multimodal analysis details and explains the formal features of passing food from hand to hand and from hand to mouth as distinct practices with distinct micro-sequential organizations. The study draws on a corpus of 14 hours of video-recordings of naturally occurring joint cooking activities in which the participants speak German, Swedish, and English. Focusing on the projectable aspects of bodily trajectories, the analysis reveals how the request sequences are achieved through the participants' early projection of how to pass the food objects and their stepwise mutual adjustments to their conjoint action trajectory. In progressively establishing who does what next and how during the food transfer, the participants orient to the relevance and distribution of interactional agency. When the normative organization of the step-by-step transfer is disregarded, an ambiguity emerges concerning what action the practice is doing, which prompts the participants to engage in significant interactional work to re-negotiate on what terms the transfer can resume. This shows how issues of interactional agency are exerted and exhibited in and through the sequential organization of social interaction. The results contribute to, and elaborate, prior findings on requests and advances our understanding for the close attention that participants to interaction pay to the detailed aspects of multimodally formatted actions and the normative expectancies that make up to their intelligibility, reflexively elaborating each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two trends have become prominent in higher education worldwide. On the one hand, globalization has favored the expansion and influence of the English language. On the other hand, email has become one of the main forms of communication in academic settings, especially in teacher-student out-of-class correspondence. While these facts have increasingly attracted scholarship attention, studies in education seem to focus more on the students’ display of face(work) alone, while neglecting the teacher’s counterpart. To redress this imbalance, the present study aims to examine face(work) as displayed in students’ email requests for consideration (e.g., on late assignments submission and class attendance) and teachers’ responses. A qualitative analysis of 20 sets of teacher-student interactions reveals different strategies opted for by the students and the teacher in face(work) management. Drawing on face-constituting theory, the findings show that whilst the students are concerned with their own face alone, the teacher is concerned with how to avoid classroom conflicts in the way that attends to one’s own face, the students’ face and the classroom harmony. In this way, the management of face(work) operates in a complex and dynamic way that allows the co-construction and reaffirmation of their respective identities. For example, whilst the students’ actions overlook the relevance of the interdependence relation between them, their peers and the teacher, which is critical for the harmony of the classroom, the teacher’s actions privilege connectedness over separateness. Furthermore, the findings suggest that cultural specificities governing the backgrounds of both the teacher and the students are not always influential in the management of face in email interactions.

Much philosophical work has examined both imperatival and non-imperatival forms of address that aim to motivate others to action. But one such kind of address has received relatively little attention: begging. This is partly surprising as begging, both as an individual act and as a widespread social practice, raises acute, yet difficult to articulate, moral and political concerns. In this paper, I identify a central form of the phenomenon which constitutively involves communicating one's relative powerlessness as a means of motivating one's target to act. I argue that this form of begging is present in a number of cases that animate many of our pre-theoretic normative worries about begging. I argue that when begging of this kind is bad for the beggar herself, this is so because either (i) the invoked powerlessness is bad for the beggar and thereby gives the action a negative evaluative meaning, or (ii) the invoked powerlessness is good/neutral, but the act of begging precludes or replaces valuable ways of interacting that the parties have reasons to care about in the context. In a slogan, the badness of begging revolves around power and helplessness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Negotiating bedtime or table manners with children can be challenging, probably even more so for parents with aphasia. This study aims to explore how parents with aphasia deal with children's resistance to requests in everyday interactions. It examines the interactional practices of parents with aphasia and their consequences for deontic authority (the right to direct another person's future action). Using conversation analysis, I conducted a collection-based study of request sequences in 10 hours of video recordings involving three parents with aphasia (two with mild and one with severe aphasia). Two different types of child resistance following a parental request were analysed: passive resistance (indicated by the child's inaction) and active resistance (indicated by the child's attempt to bargain or give an account for not doing the requested action). It is shown that all three parents with aphasia respond to passive resistance with pursuits, such as 'hey' and other prompts. However, while the two parents with greater linguistic resources deal with active resistance by seeking compliance with counterarguments and by cautiously upgrading their deontic rights, such fine-tuning is not present when the parent with more limited linguistic resources deals with his child's resistance. This parent uses intrusive physical practices, gestures, increased volume and repetition. This analysis offers insights into practices that appear to affect the ability of these parents with aphasia to negotiate with their children and thus engage in parenting and participate in family life. In order to be able to offer support when engaging with children as desired by parents with aphasia, it is important to gain further insights into how aphasia can affect the organisation of everyday family life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The shift to service and gig economy and increasing polymediality have created communicative contexts where the workers have to construct varying social relations in different kinds of digital and text-based interaction environments. This article examines how transprofessional collaboration is managed in such contexts in the field of applied arts. Based on email and mobile messaging data, we study a project where an artist creates an installation artwork for the use of an organisation. By applying the methods of conversation analysis, we investigate text-based requests and news delivery sequences related to applying for external project funding. Our results show how the participants negotiate the aspects of knowledge, power and emotion within these sequences, and by doing so, maintain mutual professional relationships and display various levels of commitment to the continuation of the project. The article illuminates the facets of transprofessional collaboration in digital professional communication and in atypical work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Whilst study abroad (SA) periods hold much promise for foreign language development, increasing research suggests sojourners' experiences are unique, and language development does not always follow a linear trajectory. For some learners, SA has little impact on their language performance despite the affordances of L2 immersion (the Survivors). Other learners maximise the potential of SA, and this has a positive impact on their language development (the Thrivers). This paper examines the selected cases of four Japanese learners of English and their request language performance during a 10-month SA in the UK. Changes in pragmatic knowledge (based on appropriateness ratings) were documented at three equidistant time points. Language contact profile data also provided quantitative insights into the learners' extracurricular language use and qualitative personal reflections. The selected cases illustrate two learners surviving the SA experience, showing minimal change in their request performance. The other two learners thrived during SA, showing accelerated performance in terms of lexical variation at the production level. This paper reports on the case histories of these learners to better understand these unique experiences and pragmatic discrepancies. Suggestions for how learners might be more pragmatically successful during SA are also offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study delves into the use of impoliteness strategies within emails sent by undergraduate and postgraduate students to their professors, aiming to discern the variance in their implementation based on (Culpeper and Hardaker's. 2017. Impoliteness. In: Culpeper, Jonathan, Haugh, Michael and Daniel Kadar (eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im) politeness, 199–225. Basingstoke: Palgrave) model. Data, comprising emails from University of Jordan students and semi-structured interviews, underwent analysis to identify impoliteness strategies and themes. Findings indicate a higher prevalence of impolite strategies among undergraduates, totaling 58 instances compared to 38 among postgraduates. Particularly, undergraduates exhibit a greater tendency toward positive impoliteness. Thematic analysis of interviews unveils three contributing factors: work experience, participation in writing skills courses, and familiarity with formality levels. Notably, undergraduates' lack of work experience contrasts with postgraduates', often impacting their email etiquette. Moreover, postgraduates' extensive enrollment in writing courses during MA studies fosters a more formal approach in communication with professors. The study underscores implications for future research, emphasizing the need to explore these dynamics further. By comprehending the influences on students' email behavior, institutions can devise tailored interventions to promote effective and respectful communication within academic setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we examine how support workers produce requests for concrete actions and, in this way, manage client participation in mental health rehabilitation. Drawing on Finnish rehabilitation group meetings as data and on conversation analysis, we examine how support workers design their requests for concrete action from clients, how clients respond, and how support workers deal with clients' responses. The results reveal that support workers tend to use verbs indicating willingness when implementing their requests, whereas clients resort to the modality of possibility. By orienting to willingness, the support workers invoke clients' sense of responsibility to contribute to group activities and simultaneously avoid questioning their capabilities. On the other hand, clients orient toward the underlying assumptions of social responsibility rather than to their own personal preferences. To conclude, our study demonstrates how support workers address the dilemma of increasing client participation and showing respect for client self-determination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this scientific paper is paying attention to the application of a very important convention, which during the period of intensification of the mutual physical and legal relations in the foreign element, enables a significant facilitation in the delivery of judicial and non-judicial acts on civil or commercial matters through channels of delivery which are provided with this Convention. Of course, the main accent is the application of this Convention in the Republic of North Macedonia and the supplies or statements provided during its signing and ratification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Iberica is the property of Asociacion Europea de Lenguas para Fines Especificos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Instant-message requests produced by intermediate learners (N = 60) of Italian as a second language (L2) with Austrian German as their first language (L1) were quantitatively analyzed and compared with the same speech acts performed by L1 speakers of Italian (N = 60). A cross-cultural comparison of requests in L1 Austrian German and L1 Italian was conducted firstly to verify whether any divergent trends in the two groups could be attributed to negative pragmatic transfer from the learners' L1. Cross-linguistic data were gathered through a multiple-choice questionnaire, L1 and L2 data through a discourse completion task. The analysis revealed minimal differences between L1 speakers of Italian and Austrian German in perceiving the most appropriate way to structure the request in terms of directness level and use of face-saving strategies. A substantial alignment of learners' realizations with those of L1 speakers was found in the overall structuring of the request, except that L1 speakers exhibited a stronger tendency to apologize. As for the use of modifiers, small differences were found in the total number as well as in the preference for some types over others. The findings suggest that any effects of transfer from L1 Austrian German to L2 Italian are generally positive. • Instant-message requests by Austrian learners and L1 speakers of Italian are compared. • A substantial cross-group alignment is found in the structuring of the request. • Small differences were found in the preference for some modifiers. • The effects of transfer from L1 Austrian German to L2 Italian are generally positive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study examines sociocultural transfer in Algerian EFL learners’ refusals to requests and offers. The written Discourse Completion Test (DCT) and retrospective interviews were used to gather data from three groups: 32 Algerian native speakers of Arabic (NASs), 42 Algerian EFL learners, and 18 American native speakers of English (NESs). The performance of these groups was compared to detect the differences in refusals realized by Algerians and Americans as well as the characteristics of sociocultural transfer in EFL learners’ refusals. The findings suggest that L1 sociocultural norms were sometimes transferred to L2. This transfer was observed at the level of semantic formulas’ choice and content. It was found that opting for directness to guarantee clarity, avoiding positive opinions and postponements to avoid misunderstandings of later compliance, giving detailed explanations to save face, using gratitude expressions abundantly due to the value of thankfulness in the Algerian culture are the characteristics and motives of this sociocultural transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This exploratory study examined the intonational patterns and corresponding speech act strategies in L1 and L2 English speakers' production of high imposition requests and refusals that were elicited using video-based multiple turn discourse completion tasks (DCTs). The participants, 34 L1 American English speakers and 14 high-proficiency L2 English speakers, recorded their oral responses to 10 multiple-turn video-based DCTs. Using Brazil's (1997) framework, the collected speech samples were analyzed for tone choices in each tone unit. Pragmatic strategies in the produced speech acts were analyzed by adapting the existing coding frameworks (Beebe et al., 1990; Blum-Kulka et al., 1989). The extracted tone choices and lexico-mathematical strategies were compared between the two language groups. The results preliminarily revealed differences in the use of tones by L1 and L2 English speakers in performing requests and refusals. Moreover, while the employed speech act strategies were largely similar between the two speaker groups, the associated tone choices showed contrasting usage patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative study examines how male-identified and female-identified individuals use reflexive metadiscourse in the construction of affiliative communication, i.e., a mode of communication traditionally coded as feminine. Specifically, it examines requests made in the public context of group email. Both reflexive metadiscourse and affiliative communication are analysed with the concept of indexicality, and two novel sub-categories (i.e., directing and committing) are added to an existing taxonomy. The findings show that whether communicating to institutional subordinates, equals, or superiors, female-identified and male-identified senders displayed great similarity in their use of reflexive metadiscourse in the construction of affiliative communication. Amongst other things, reflexive metadiscourse indirectly indexed the following communicative behaviours associated with affiliative communication: sharing contextual information, expressing supportive feedback, constructing diminutive personas, and suppressing personal agency. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the findings and directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

16th-century Scots was a developing standard variety that was being elaborated to assume new communicative functions hitherto fulfilled by Latin and French – both languages with well-established discourse traditions. The elaboration of Scots happened by adopting these discursive practices into the vernacular, thus innovating new structures and patterns. This study, which focuses on the epistolary discourse tradition, aims to explore to what extent requestive patterns in 16th-century Scots letters were influenced by French pragmalinguistic models. A comparative analysis of French letters in the foreign correspondence of Mary of Lorraine with letters from her Scots correspondence shows that the French requestive models had a clear impact on the Scots requestive repertoire. It further indicates that the discursive practices did not remain static but evolved in the Scots context.

Modern multi-processor systems-on-chip (MPSoCs) are characterized by caches shared by multiple cores. These shared caches receive requests issued by the processor cores. Requests that are subject to cache misses may result in the generation of responses. These responses are received from the lower level of the memory hierarchy and written to the cache. The outstanding requests and responses contend for the shared cache bandwidth. To mitigate the impact of the cache bandwidth contention on the overall system performance, an efficient request and response arbitration policy is needed. Research on shared cache management has neglected the additional cache contention caused by responses, which are written to the cache. We propose CABARRE, a novel request and response arbitration policy at shared caches, so as to improve the overall system performance. CABARRE shows a performance improvement of 23% on average across a set of SPEC workloads compared to straightforward adaptations of state-ofthe- art solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study aims to investigate the various request constructions used in Classical Arabic and Modern Arabic language by identifying the differences in their usage in these two different genres. Also, the study attempts to trace the cases of felicitous and infelicitous requests in the Arabic language. Methodologically, the current study employs a web-based corpus tool (Sketch Engine) to analyze different corpora: the first one is Classical Arabic, represented by King Saud University Corpus of Classical Arabic, while the second is The Arabic Web Corpus "arTenTen" representing Modern Arabic. To do so, the study relies on felicity conditions to qualitatively interpret the quantitative data, i.e., following a mixed mode method. The findings of the present study show that request constructions vary in terms of occurrence between Classical Arabic and Modern Arabic. In Classical Arabic, (/laa/(ا ل of prohibition is the most frequent construction, which is rarely used in the Web corpus where the command in the form of (/lam/+ لم verb) is the most commonly emerging one, which is, in turn, seldom employed in the former corpus. The vocative (/ya/ياا) is the second most frequent construction in Classical Arabic, whilst the interrogative (/hel/هل) emerged in the other genre. The third most common request construction is the interrogative (/hel/هل) in Classical Arabic, but the vocative (/ya/يا) is used in Modern Arabic. Nonetheless, some of these constructions fail to accomplish two or more conditions and hence are regarded as infelicitous requests. Such infelicitous constructions serve other functions than requests, such as negation, exclamation, and sarcasm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how L2 learners of English at different pragmatic performance levels implement requests during role-play assessment interaction. In doing so, the role of grammar-for-interaction as validity evidence of assessing interactional competence is explicated. Using qualitative and quantitative data, the following research questions are investigated: (a) How do learners use grammar differently depending on the role-play request situations they are engaged in?; (b) To what extent are learners' role-play performance levels associated with the ability to use context-sensitive grammar when co-constructing request sequences? The data come from a database of 102 L2 English learners' role-play interactions with 45 hours of recorded interaction in total. The role-play assessment tasks include various real-life communicative situations, such as requests designed for specific interlocutors in a university context. Using conversation analysis, the role-play interactions at different performance levels were analyzed. Sequential analyses showed that higher-level learners utilized diverse grammatical formats that are sensitive to their sequential positions and contingencies associated with requests. As quantitative evidence, the relationship between selected grammatical constructions and the learners' role-play performance levels determined by trained raters was examined. With this, I discuss the role of grammar-for-interaction in defining and assessing interactional competence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With an increasing number of young adult stroke survivors, there is a specific need to investigate how aphasia affects parenting. Raising a child happens through interaction, and centrally involves requests, such as 'go to bed', and 'sit still'. Aphasia may impede participation in interaction and thus potentially also the possibilities to make requests to children and – from a wider perspective – do parenting. This study aims to explore practices employed by parents with aphasia to ask their children to do or to stop an action during everyday interactions (e.g. mealtimes, games). The design of requests is systematically examined to shed light on the way deontic authority (the right to direct another person's future action) is displayed by parents with aphasia. Using conversation analysis (CA), we carried out a collection-based study of 46 request sequences in 10 hours of video recordings involving three parents with aphasia (two with mild and one with severe aphasia). Stopping a child's action may be easier to achieve than getting a child to do something, as it requires less specification of the action. Furthermore, the severity of aphasia may limit the fine-tuning of deontic authority. The persons with mild aphasia adjust the degree of authority for example by adding mitigating words, such as 'a bit'. The person with severe aphasia uses requests that mostly show unmitigated authority for example by using higher volume. Structured contexts, such as games and mealtimes, may offer resources for all three parents with aphasia because they provide scaffolded interaction. The analysis offers insights into practices that may allow or hinder these parents with aphasia to perform requests and thus to engage in parenting and participate in family life. Our findings suggest that people with aphasia could benefit from training to implement activities such as requesting in rehabilitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current experiment employs a variational pragmatics perspective to explore how the contextual variables of power, distance, and imposition jointly affect social groups' and individuals' choice of verb forms in requests in Madrid, Spain. Using a mixed-method approach to explore the requests of 111 Spanish speakers from Madrid, quantitative analyses determined the level of significance and hierarchical order of the predictor variables of power, distance, and imposition on verb form and also the distribution of verb forms by gender, with male and female participants exhibiting significant differences. Additionally, certain participants demonstrated decreased sensitivity to contextual factors, adopting more categorically indirect or direct request strategies. The examination of both gendered request patterns and the stances that single participants adopt through their verb-form selections contributes to our understanding of the social moves that are made by all speakers, not just those who fall within the gendered norms. The results highlight the different frames and social meanings attached to these forms at the micro- and macro-social levels, providing new insight into the complex relationship among linguistic variables, contextual factors, and social groups and individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst study abroad (SA) periods hold much promise for foreign language development, increasing research suggests sojourners’ experiences are unique, and language development does not always follow a linear trajectory. For some learners, SA has little impact on their language performance despite the affordances of L2 immersion (the Survivors). Other learners maximise the potential of SA, and this has a positive impact on their language development (the Thrivers). This paper examines the selected cases of four Japanese learners of English and their request language performance during a 10-month SA in the UK. Changes in pragmatic knowledge (based on appropriateness ratings) were documented at three equidistant time points. Language contact profile data also provided quantitative insights into the learners’ extracurricular language use and qualitative personal reflections. The selected cases illustrate two learners surviving the SA experience, showing minimal change in their request performance. The other two learners thrived during SA, showing accelerated performance in terms of lexical variation at the production level. This paper reports on the case histories of these learners to better understand these unique experiences and pragmatic discrepancies. Suggestions for how learners might be more pragmatically successful during SA are also offered.

This study investigates the prosody of the Estonian parenthetical palun ‘please’ in imperative requests. The occurrence of prosodic phrase boundary cues such as pauses, pre-boundary lengthening, and creaky voice as well as pitch characteristics and accentuation are analysed. The analysis is based on 753 utterances, where palun appears in three different positions: initial, medial or final. The requests were elicited using context descriptions from 21 female speakers of Estonian. The results show that palun is not phrased as a separate intonation phrase and that its intonation and accentuation vary depending on its position in the host utterance. Utterance-initially, palun always receives an intonational pitch accent while utterance-finally it is unaccented. It is concluded that the integrated prosody of palun may derive from its discourse marker-like function. Its prosody may be representative of certain other categories of parentheticals with similar functional properties such as comment clauses and reporting verbs, but different from functionally more independent parentheticals that express a proposition or speech act of their own. Kokkuvõte. Eva Liina Asu, Heete Sahkai, Pärtel Lippus: Kiilu palun prosoodiline fraseerimine eesti palvetes. Käesolev artikkel uurib kiilu palun prosoodiat eesti keele käsklausena vormistatud palvetes. Vaadeldakse prosoodilise fraasipiiri tunnuste (pausid, lõpupikenemine ja kärisev häälelaad) esinemist ning põhitooni ja aktsentueerimist. Materjaliks on 753 lausungit, kus palun esineb kolmes eri positsioonis: lause alguses, keskel ja lõpus. Materjal salvestati 21 eesti emakeelega naiskõnelejalt katses, kus osalejad pidid palveid esitama nii, nagu nad kontekstikirjelduse põhjal vastavas olukorras seda teeksid. Tulemused näitavad, et sõna palun ei fraseerita eraldi intonatsioonifraasina ja selle intonatsioon ja aktsentueeritus varieeruvad sõltuvalt lausepositsioonist. Lause alguses saab palun alati intonatsioonilise tooniaktsendi, aga lause lõpus on see aktsentueerimata. Kokkuvõtvalt võib palun’i integreeritud prosoodia tuleneda tema diskursusemarkeri-laadsest funktsioonist. Sellisena võib ta sarnaneda prosoodiliselt ka mõningate teiste sarnaselt funktsioneerivate kiiludega, nagu episteemilised või evidentsiaalsed kiilud (nt ma arvan, ütles ta), aga erineda funktsionaalselt iseseisvamatest kiiludest, mis väljendavad eraldiseisvat propositsiooni või kõneakti.

This study investigated the linguistic and textual features characterizing direct and indirect speech act productions of requests and refusals in English by two multilingual populations: Arabic native speakers for whom English is their L3 and Hebrew is their L2, and Hebrew native speakers for whom English is their L2. Data were collected using a Discourse Completion Task and a background questionnaire. The findings revealed no statistical differences between the groups in the production of either the direct or the indirect mode of request and refusal: both groups preferred the indirect mode for requests and the direct mode for refusals. However, there were differences in the use of linguistic/textual features between direct and indirect requests/refusals within each language group, and differences in the use of features between the language groups within the directness mode. These findings are discussed in terms of cultural influences as well as differences in English proficiency levels. • Both Hebrew (L1) and Arabic (L1) speakers prefer indirect to direct requests and direct to indirect refusals in their EFL. • The Arabic (L1) speakers made more attempts at mitigation in their indirect than in their direct requests/refusals in EFL. • The Hebrew (L1) speakers employed more mitigation in their direct than in their indirect requests/refusals in EFL. • Overall, the Hebrew (L1) speakers exhibited greater pragmalinguistic competence in EFL than their Arabic (L1) cohorts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I ask you to X. You now have a reason to X. My request gave you a reason. How? One unpopular theory is the epistemic account, according to which requests do not create any new reasons but instead simply reveal information. For instance, my request that you X reveals that I desire that you X, and my desire gives you a reason to X. Peter Schaber has recently attacked both the epistemic account and other theories of the reason-giving force of requests. Schaber defends a new theory of the reason-giving force of requests according to which request give reasons because it is valuable for requesters and requestees that requests have this power. In this paper I argue that Schaber's attack on the epistemic account fails, and that his own theory ought to be rejected because it faces compelling objections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the prosody of the Estonian parenthetical palun 'please' in imperative requests. The occurrence of prosodic phrase boundary cues such as pauses, pre-boundary lengthening, and creaky voice as well as pitch characteristics and accentuation are analysed. The analysis is based on 753 utterances, where palun appears in three different positions: initial, medial or final. The requests were elicited using context descriptions from 21 female speakers of Estonian. The results show that palun is not phrased as a separate intonation phrase and that its intonation and accentuation vary depending on its position in the host utterance. Utterance-initially, palun always receives an intonational pitch accent while utterancefinally it is unaccented. It is concluded that the integrated prosody of palun may derive from its discourse marker-like function. Its prosody may be representative of certain other categories of parentheticals with similar functional properties such as comment clauses and reporting verbs, but different from functionally more independent parentheticals that express a proposition or speech act of their own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article empirically investigates possible politeness effects of different syntactic, morphosyntactic, and lexical mitigating strategies in German requests. In addition to the explicitness of the requestive utterance, internal and external modifiers as well as vocatives are considered. Based on the assumption that the weight of imposition has an influence on linguistic politeness, experimentally elicited production data for two requestive situations with a differing degree of imposition are compared regarding their formal properties. The data come from an online survey in which 578 native speakers of German (from Germany, Switzerland, and Austria) took part. The participants produced 1,006 requests. These were coded for several mitigating strategies and analyzed with a multifactorial analysis in order to identify the devices that are used in the high-imposition context and thus can be interpreted as conveying extra politeness. An important finding is that increased politeness is realized via devices beyond the head act strategy, namely morpho-syntactic and lexical tentativeness markers as well as multiple external modifiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The current paper presents an analysis of the realisation of requests in three European linguacultures - British English, Spanish, and Romanian - as expressed in weekly press releases during the Covid-19 pandemic. A comparative study that looks into the Request Speech Act, more precisely into its various forms of expression and its conventional realisation patterns, was conducted according to a cross-cultural pragmatic analysis framework. The conclusive observations underline the fact that each linguaculture constructs a culture-bound pattern for the realisation of the Request Speech Act, despite certain similarities explicable due to common origins or global linguistic influences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Requesting police assistance can be especially challenging in cases of domestic violence, since perpetrators may be able to overhear victims' telephone calls. This means that callers may not be able to make direct requests for help. Simultaneously, a routine task for police call-takers is to categorize incoming calls as genuine rather than, say, accidental or nuisance. We collected and transcribed 192 audio-recorded calls to a UK police service, which included interactions between callers and call-takers as well as between national operators and local call-takers. The latter provided access to the professional parties' pre-transfer discussion and interpretation of what kind of trouble might be occurring in silent and otherwise ambiguous calls. Using conversation analysis, we found that, as well as unambiguous requests for help (e.g. 'I need you to come because of assault by my partner'), callers formulated apparently inapposite turns ('hiya, you all right?') and used non-lexical resources (e.g. breaths) to build actions which also mobilized assistance. Professional call-takers' discussions included domestic violence-implicative interpretations (e.g. 'I heard a woman shout'). Parties collaboratively leveraged the affordances of turn design and sequence to request and offer help without revealing to potentially overhearing parties that callers were talking to the police. Our findings have implications for understanding how actions like requesting are accomplished in social interaction, as well as for training call-takers to recognize and act on communicative ambiguities in cases of domestic violence. Data are in British English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the issues of making effective decisions about investing in commercial accounts and currencies. In order to know how much these solutions will be beneficial in the long term, specialized information is needed: data on the dynamics of growth, decline in the value of accounts and currencies, analytical information. But there is no single source where this data will be accumulated, systematized and stored. Purpose – create a tool for collecting and storing the parameters of investment accounts for their subsequent analysis in order to make an effective investment decision. Method or methodology of work: the article discusses a method that can implement a tool for collecting specialized information of investment accounts, two tools can be used for this: Postgresql databases and Python programming language Result: a tool has been developed that performs the function of collecting and storing information on investment accounts. Scope of the results: the data obtained, which are stored in the database, should be used to identify high-yield accounts for subsequent investment.

The main purpose of the present study is to propose a framework for implementing group dynamic assessment (DA) using students' smartphones for improving and assessing EFL learners' ability to produce well-formed and appropriate requests. This study focuses on five learner reciprocity moves during DA interactions to get deeper insights into the learners' development. During three treatment sessions, the participants of the DA style instruction were asked to make requests in response to a number of scenarios during mobile-mediated group interactions via WhatsApp. The DA group participants were prompted to revise and self-correct their incorrect requests by a sequence of incrementally-ordered hints from most implicit to most explicit based on the sociocultural framework. The analysis of learners' reciprocity moves during the three DA sessions revealed that learners became progressively more responsive to mediation for formulating correct requests and achieved a more agentive role to interact with the mediator. Analyzing learners' scores obtained from three testing occasions also revealed that mobile-mediated DA was significantly effective to promote the learners' knowledge of request strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few of us are good at asking for what we want or at listening to criticism. In this paper, I explore the many reasons why, emphasizing self psychological explanations, while also noting contributions from marital research, systems theory, and other psychoanalytic schools of thought. After a brief introduction, I provide an experience-near discussion of why people have trouble asking for what they want, the dysfunctional ways they try to avoid making themselves vulnerable, and guidelines for more effective self-assertion. I then discuss the related challenges of listening to other people's criticism, common pitfalls encountered, and mistakes made, and again offer practical suggestions for helping patients to do better. Along the way, I offer case vignettes to illustrate my thinking. Though not usually described in such everyday language, these speaking and listening challenges are central to our daily work as couple therapists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies adults' responses to children's requests by focusing on turns that account for not granting the request on the grounds of involvement in another activity, i.e., multiactivity. The data consist of everyday interactions among family members at homes and in cars. The collection – 17 request sequences – is analysed with the conversation analytic method. We show the following: first, account turns verbalise either the ongoing or the requested activity, or both; second, account turns are a practice for foregrounding and communicating "exclusive order", i.e., they indicate that two progressing activities intersect with each other and cannot be progressed simultaneously, and that one activity is prioritised over another; third, account turns are used either to suspend or abandon the course of action initiated by the request; fourth, accounts – through various sequential and turn design features – display adults' level of commitment to resuming and returning to the requested activity later; and, finally, accounts indicating high commitment negotiate the "sequential implicativenesses" of the intersecting courses of action, displaying orientation to progress initiated activities. Accounts that display partial or no commitment frame the prioritisation of an activity in terms of "incapability" or "unwillingness" to progress the request sequence and thereby construct the "limits of multiactivity" in situ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed at finding the strategies of politeness in requests as well as the potential differences between Jordanian children in their use of such strategies. The study compared the participants on the basis of two variables: age and gender. According to the age variable, the participants were divided into three groups: 5, 7 and 9 year-olds. Each group contained 24 participants who were then divided into 12 males and 12 females. The researchers used video-recording to elicit the participants' requests while they ask the researchers for some cookies. On the basis of age, the findings support previous research that age has an obvious effect on the use of politeness in requests. It was found that nine-year-olds were more able to use indirect forms of requests than seven and five- year- old children. Although 5 and 7-year-olds were able to use indirect forms, they opted more to direct requests that have a semantic softener. On the basis of gender, the differences between males and females in using direct and indirect requests were irrelevant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some utterances are pragmatically ambiguous. For instance, Tu peux fermer la fenêtre ? ("Can you close the window?") can be a request for information or an "indirect request" (IR) to close the window. A possible way for speakers to make it clear whether they intend these expressions as a direct or indirect speech act is to use cues such as gestures or prosody. It has been shown for English that participants' identifications of IRs are predicted by f0 slope, mean f0, and f0 duration. However, the extent to which these findings extend to other languages remains unknown. In this article, we explore the prosodic features associated with French IRs, a language poorly documented from that perspective. We address two research questions: Are listeners' pragmatic interpretations of French IR constructions predicted by speaker's original intent? Do prosodic cues play the same role in French modal interrogatives as in declarative remarks? We find, first, that remarks with more positive f0 slope are more likely to be interpreted as requests, but modal interrogatives with more positive f0 slope are more likely to be taken as questions. Second, while longer remarks were more likely to be interpreted as requests, longer modal interrogatives were more likely to be interpreted as questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses how the realizations of different constitutive components of Twitter complaints shape the perception of these complaints by other customers. We present three experiments on French language in which we test how customer complaint perception is impacted by the realization of the complainable (Exp. 1), of the entity responsible for the complainable (Exp. 2), and of the customer's wish for the complainable to be remedied (Exp. 3). The results of Exp. 1 indicate that the perceived likelihood that the complaint will be responded to by the company is highest when the complainable is realized as a combination of an assertion + question + picture. In Exp. 2, we found that, in comparison with the use of the discourse marker dites to refer to the entity responsible for the complainable, the use of a noun phrase or the absence of this component increases perceived politeness. Finally, our data from Exp. 3 reveal that, compared to the use of an imperative to voice the customer's wish for the complainable to be remedied, "indirect" request forms, and preparatory interrogatives, in particular, are perceived as more polite, as expressing lower dissatisfaction, and as decreasing the likelihood of a response from the company. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent cross-linguistic research has demonstrated that speakers use a prosodic mitigation strategy when addressing higher status interlocutors by talking more slowly, reducing the intensity and lowering the overall fundamental frequency (F0). Much less is known, however, about how politeness-related meaning is expressed multimodally (i.e., combining verbal and multimodal channels). The present study investigates how Catalan native speakers encode politeness-related meanings through facial and body cues. We test whether speakers apply a gestural mitigation strategy and use specific hedging devices in socially distant situations (e.g., when asking an older person of higher status for a favor). Twenty Catalan speakers were video-recorded while participating in a discourse elicitation task where they were required to produce requests in polite and non-polite contexts. In the resulting recordings, a set of 21 facial and body cues associated with speech were coded and analyzed. The results show that politeness-related meanings are expressed through gestural mitigation strategies that go hand-in-hand with previously reported prosodic mitigation strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of RumeliDE Journal of Language & Literature Research / RumeliDE Dil ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi is the property of RumeliDE Uluslararasi Hakemli Dil & Edebiyat Arastirmalari Dergisi and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)