Linguistic politeness in requests in a virtual environment

comparative case study Spanish-German

Abstract

Research on how requests are performed in face-to-face environments suggests that when there is high social distance between speaker and hearer, the speaker will try to save the hearer’s face and mitigate the imposition by using negative politeness. However, an increasing number of studies indicate that in virtual environments, even when the social distance between participants is high, participants tend to use mostly positive politeness or use politeness differently. In order to contribute to research in this field, in this study we present an analysis of the requests and politeness strategies used by Spanish and German students who participated in an online collaborative project in order to simulate the creation of a company via eTandem. Besides corroborating previous results, findings in this study also suggest that requests and politeness strategies used in this environment are not influenced by the speaker’s mother tongue and culture but are rather modelled on the partner’s use of the same.