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Preference Organization and Cross-Cultural Variation in Request Responses: A Corpus-Based Comparison of British and American English

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Abstract

This study compares request responses in two national varieties of English, American English (AmE) and British English. The responses are manually retrieved from two corpora of English, the British component to the International Corpus of English and the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English and analyzed both for their function and format. It is shown that request responses in both varieties pattern as preference structure would predict: compliant responses occur more frequently than non-compliant ones and can thus be understood as the preferred response type to requestive first pair parts. The analysis of co-occurrence patterns of first and second pair parts reveals that the directness level of the first pair part does not significantly influence the response type of the second pair part. It does, however, have an impact on the level of explicitness of the response. While cross-cultural differences in request responses are generally rare in the present database, they do surface in the higher numbers for implicit compliance in the AmE corpus. These results show the importance of a cross-cultural approach to the study of naturally occurring request responses retrieved from corpora of authentic speech.

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Notes

  1. For DCT-based studies on English cf. e.g. Blum-Kulka et al. (1989), Breuer and Geluykens (2007), Barron (2008).

  2. The request taxonomy introduced by Ervin-Tripp (1976) is also used in Goldschmidt’s (1998) account of what she calls ‘favor asking’ sequences in American English.

  3. See Flöck (2016) for a more thorough description of the database. As the current database of responses stems from the same subcorpora, the information given there also apply to the present study.

  4. The factors response type (β = −0.5347, SE = 1.1437, Z = 0.468, p = 0.6401) and directness of the request (β = −0.1260, SE = 0.2395, Z = −0.526, p = 0.5988) did not have a significant effect on response category.

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  1. Department of English and American Studies, University of Oldenburg, Ammerlaender Heerstr. 114-118, 26129, Oldenburg, Germany

    Ilka Flöck & Ronald Geluykens

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  1. Ilka Flöck
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  2. Ronald Geluykens
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Correspondence to Ilka Flöck.

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Flöck, I., Geluykens, R. Preference Organization and Cross-Cultural Variation in Request Responses: A Corpus-Based Comparison of British and American English. Corpus Pragmatics 2, 57–82 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41701-017-0022-y

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