Politeness in Requests: a study

The aim of this paper is to see how the social and power relations, influenced by cultural and linguistic differences, affect politeness in communication between participants, particularly through the speech acts of requesting and complaining. Politeness is considered an essential element in society. It helps navigate entire relationships between participants in all kinds of situational and contextual backgrounds. Knowing politeness strategies works well in most situations in given contexts, it is what provides a feeling of safe predictability for participants when going into an interaction. Service encounters in particular have a certain duality of communicative nature which makes them interesting to examine. The participants in this study were examined in a service encounter setting, both belonging to communities of practice and one side being customers at a restaurant and the other being servers. Customers and servers represent roles in a situational context. The theoretical background focused specifically on politeness theory, strategies and service encounters. Afterwards it is followed by the research section which describes the results and provides a discussion. The final section is the conclusion. Through research in the form of an interview, subjects provided examples and descriptions of the interrelation, communication and levels of politeness between them and the members. The research proposed the idea that, along with the nature of their roles, social status and identity give a lot more power to one side in the interaction (the customer), which also influenced politeness in interactions. A difference in power and hierarchy is evident and, combined with all of the other factors, gives the full image of the complexity in the particular encounters of the service setting