Indirectness and politeness in Turkish–German bilingual and Turkish monolingual requests

Indirectness and politeness in Turkish–German

bilingual and Turkish monolingual requests

Leyla Marti *

Department of Foreign Language Education, Faculty of Education, Bogazici University,

34342 Bebek, Istanbul, Turkey

Received 29 January 2003; received in revised form 12 January 2005; accepted 4 May 2005

Abstract

This study focuses on both the realisation and politeness perception of requests made by Turkish

monolingual speakers and Turkish–German bilingual returnees. It investigates the possibility that the

Turkish–German bilingual returnees’ pragmatic performance may have been affected by pragmatic

transfer from German. As an initial step, a discourse completion test (DCT) was administered to

Turkish monolinguals and Turkish–German bilingual returnees, in order to elicit requests in 10

different situations. Second, a politeness rating questionnaire was used to measure the perceived

politeness of requests in Turkish in order to investigate the relationship between indirectness and

politeness. The results of the questionnaire showed that indirectness and politeness are related, but

not linearly linked concepts. In regard to indirectness, a cross-cultural comparison revealed that

Turkish monolingual speakers seemed to prefer more direct strategies when compared to German

speakers. Although the overall results of the DCT did not confirm pragmatic transfer, in some

strategies the bilinguals preferred indirectness more than Turkish monolinguals did� a finding which

is consistent with the hypothesis that they experienced some influence from German. Furthermore,

this study explores the nature of requests beyond the limits of traditional speech act theory. Adopting

a broader perspective when analyzing the DCT data (i.e., moving beyond the Blum-Kulka et al.

[1989] framework), my study shows that informants employ strategies other than those reported in

most studies using DCTs: deliberate choices of opting out, providing alternative solutions, and

attempts at negotiation. A re-analysis of the DCT data revealed that in some situations, the Turkish

monolinguals tended to be more reluctant to make a request, whereas the Turkish–German bilinguals

opted out less frequently, but preferred indirect strategies. Thus, further investigation needs to cover

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Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2006) 1836–1869

* Tel.: +90 212 359 4597; fax: +90 212 257 5036.

E-mail addresses: [email protected], [email protected].

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not only the ‘said’, but also the ‘unsaid’ responses of the requestees, in order to shed more light on the

issue of indirectness.

# 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Indirectness; Politeness; Discourse completion test; CCSARP; Pragmatic transfer; Requests;

Turkish; Turkish–German bilinguals

1. Introduction

Indirectness occupies a central role in studies of politeness. One large study, the Cross-

Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP), has been administered to university

students in eight cultures or languages (later this number rose to 13, see Holmes, 1991) to

investigate cross-cultural and intralingual variation in two speech acts: requests and

apologies (Blum-Kulka and Olshtain, 1984; Blum-Kulka and House, 1989). In a similar

study, House and Kasper (1981) investigated the directness levels of German and English

speakers. That study revealed that different norms of verbal behavior exist in different

cultures, in particular, that German speakers, when compared to English speakers, in

general use higher levels of directness in requests and complaints. This might serve as an

explanation of why native speakers of English usually perceive the verbal behavior of

German learners of English as being rather impolite (for details see House and Kasper,

1981; and also House, 2000, 2005). This issue is particularly important to me, since many

returnees from Germany (including myself), upon taking up residence in Turkey, have

encountered instances, where we, as returnees, were categorised as too direct, disrespectful

or even too naive or unrestrained. Some of the reasons why returnees were judged to be

‘direct’ might be: lack of linguistic competence, cultural differences, as well as lack of

knowledge of the values or rules of Turkish society. However, as the House and Kasper

(1981) study shows, different norms of verbal behavior could be a further reason why the

bilinguals were perceived as ‘direct’.

This study aims to explore the following questions: Are Turkish–German bilingual

returnees more direct than Turkish monolinguals? and How direct are Turkish speakers

compared to speakers of other cultures or languages?

Among the few studies investigating speech acts in Turkish is Huls’s (1989) study on

directness. She recorded and analyzed the family interaction of a working or lower class

Turkish migrant family in the Netherlands. The results of her analysis are compared with a

‘‘higher’’ and ‘‘lower class’’ Dutch family (Huls, 1989:154). The findings suggest that the

Turkish family, in comparison to the Dutch families, used imperative forms more

frequently. In other words, according to Huls (1989), the Turkish speakers were perceived

to be more direct than the Dutch speakers.

In order to investigate directness in Turkish, I used a written Discourse Completion Test

(DCT), comprising 10 situations where informants were asked to provide requests. The

DCT developed in the CCSARP collected requests and complaints from different cultures

(see Blum-Kulka and Olshtain, 1984); the focus of the present study is on requests, one of

the most investigated speech acts in cross-cultural pragmatics (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989;

Garcia, 1993; Hickey and Steward, 2005; Rinnert and Kobayashi, 1999; Sifianou, 1992;

L. Marti / Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2006) 1836–1869 1837

etc.). Since comparability was one of the main aims of the study, I have used some

situations from the CCSARP. The disadvantages of this method of data collection are well

known (e.g., Rose, 1994). The data at hand are elicited data and have the limitation of

presenting what informants would say in particular situations, not what they actually say.

However, large amounts of data obtained by means of DCTs provide a template of the

stereotypical realisation patterns of speech acts (Yuan, 2001:289) and may give an insight

into cultural norms of verbal behavior. In order to make cross-cultural comparison

possible, I have translated and adapted the CCSARP directness scale (in)to Turkish.

A second focus of the present study is politeness. Whenever indirectness is the issue, an

association is made with politeness. Therefore, it seems important to explore whether these

two concepts are related. A politeness rating questionnaire has been used to investigate the

perceived politeness of Turkish native speakers. Various request forms of different

directness levels have been rated in terms of politeness by native speakers of Turkish.

Thirdly, the study re-analyzes the results of the DCT, moving beyond Blum-Kulka

et al.’s (1989) CCSARP framework. A careful analysis of my data (though admittedly

collected within the constraints of the written DCT situation) reveals that speakers are not

limited to making their requests straightforwardly, but use a variety of ways. Hence, I argue

for the necessity to consider not only ‘the said’, but also ‘the unsaid’ responses of the

informants, namely: deliberate choices of opting out; alternative solutions provided by

informants; and attempts for negotiation while making a request.

2. Politeness versus indirectness

Linguists such as Leech (1983) or Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) argue for a strong

link between indirectness and politeness. Leech (1983:108) claims that, when

propositional content is kept constant, the use of more and more indirect illocutions

will generally result in more politeness. One reason for this is, according to him, the

increase of optionality given to the hearer.1 The other reason is ‘‘the more indirect an

illocution is, the more diminished and tentative its force tends to be’’ (Leech, 1983:108). In

other words, the illocution Answer the phone is perceived to be less polite than Could you

possibly answer the phone? Because it is more direct and gives less optionality to the hearer

(Leech, 1983:108), the assumption being that the more optionality the hearer is given, the

easier it is for him or her to say no, and consequently, the more polite the utterance is

perceived to be.

Brown and Levinson (1987) claim that there is an intrinsic ranking of politeness

strategies in terms of indirectness. Referring to Goffman’s (1955, 1967) notion of face, as

‘the public self image’, reputation, or self-esteem of a person, they argue that, since it is in

the mutual interest of interlocutors to save, maintain, or support each other’s face, so-called

Face Threatening Acts (FTA) are either avoided (if possible), or different strategies are

employed to counteract or soften the FTAs. These different strategies are presented in the

form of five ‘superstrategies’ for performing FTAs:

L. Marti / Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2006) 1836–18691838

1 However, it should be noted that both notions, indirectness and optionality, have received criticism for not

being applicable in some other cultures (e.g., Blum-Kulka, 1987; Spencer-Oatey, 1992; Wierzbicka, 1985).

1. Bald-on record: FTA performed bald-on-record, in a direct and concise way without

redressive action.

2. Positive politeness: FTA performed with redressive action. Strategies oriented towards

positive face of the hearer.

3. Negative politeness: FTA performed with redressive action. Strategies oriented towards

negative face of the hearer.

4. Off-record: FTA performed off-record. Strategies that might allow the act to have more

than one interpretation.

5. Avoidance: FTA not performed.

The first superstrategy (bald-on-record) is ranked as the most direct strategy. Bald-on-

record covers strategies usually using the imperative form without any redress and is

employed when face threat is minimal. The last strategy (avoidance), at the other end of the

continuum, is considered as the most indirect superstrategy and is employed when there is

maximum face-threat.

Positive politeness consists of strategies seeking common ground or co-operation, such

as in jokes or offers. However, although the FTAs are performed with redressive action

when adopting positive politeness, indirectness is not included among these strategies. In

terms of negative politeness, conventional indirectness is a suitable mitigating strategy;

Brown and Levinson (1987:130) state that ‘‘negative politeness enjoins both on record

delivery and redress of an FTA’’. In other words, according to them, the wish to ‘Be Direct’

to perform a face-threatening act on record clashes with the wish to ‘Be Indirect’ in order

not to coerce the hearer. The compromise uses a conventionalized form with an

unambiguous meaning in the context, although it conveys a different meaning from the

literal one. Such compromises are usually in the form of indirect speech acts, which,

according to Brown and Levinson (1987:134), ‘‘function as hedges on illocutionary force’’.

Further, at the more indirect end of the scale are off-record strategies, which consist of all

types of hints, metaphors, tautologies, etc. A strategy is considered off-record when more

than one meaning or intent can be attributed to the act. Finally, there is the choice to not

perform an FTA at all, which is considered to be even more polite than an off-record

strategy (Brown and Levinson, 1987:20–21).

Briefly summarized, it can be said that the above strategies are employed according to

the degree of face threat that a person might encounter or estimate for an act. The

assessment of the amount of face threat, according to Brown and Levinson, depends

predominantly on the following variables: relative power of the speaker, social distance

(between the interlocutors), and rank (degree of imposition). According to them, by

adding these values, we should be able to calculate the weight of an FTA. However,

research shows that matters are more complicated (see, e.g., Craig et al., 1986; Holtgraves

and Yang, 1990, 1992; Wood and Kroger, 1991; Bargiela-Chiappini and Harris, 1996;

Yeung, 1997).

Whereas Brown and Levinson (1987) and Leech’s (1983) influential theories have

underlined parallels, or even strong relationship between the notions of indirectness and

politeness, studies such as Blum-Kulka’s (1987) show that such relationships do not always

hold. Blum-Kulka (1987) reports that the most polite strategies in English and Hebrew are

perceived to be the conventionally indirect ones (see also Wierzbicka, 1985). Although


Brown and Levinson (1987) admit that some indirect forms might not be considered polite

in some contexts, such as when addressed to an intimate friend, they maintain the view that

the more indirect a strategy is, the more polite it is perceived, thus rejecting criticism of

their politeness model and insisting on its adequacy (see Politeness [1987], a re-issue of

their previously published work in 1978).

Thomas (1995:161) comments on the notion of optionality and states that allowing

optionality or giving the appearance of allowing optionality to the addressee in requests

corresponds to a Western-type notion of politeness. She points to Spencer-Oatey’s study

(1992:17) where it is stated that a polite Chinese host would choose the dishes for the guest

in a restaurant without consulting him or her. Wierzbicka (1985:145) goes even further

and expresses her reservation as to whether some of the differences in the use of speech

acts in English and Polish can be explained by just the notion of politeness. She links the

extensive Polish use of interrogative and conditional forms, as contrasted with the

restrictive use of the imperative in English to cultural norms and assumptions. She states,

for example, that an utterance such as ‘‘Why don’t you close the window?’’2 would not be

interpreted as a request in Polish, but would rather ‘‘imply unreasonable and stubborn

behaviour on the part of the addressee’’ (Wierzbicka, 1985:152). She notes that using a flat

imperative in Polish would be one of the milder, softer ways of giving directives

(Wierzbicka, 1985:154) and adds that in Polish, using an imperative form does not

necessarily imply impoliteness.3 Therefore, although I subscribe to Brown and Levinson’s

hypothesis that face is connected with politeness, I would not qualify particular speech

acts or strategies as inherently polite or impolite. My purpose in this study is mainly to

establish norms or tendencies, in other words, the strategies that are perceived to be polite

in a given situation.

3. Methodology

3.1. The indirectness framework used in this study

Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1984) state that there have been several attempts to establish

a classification of request strategies that would form a universally valid scale of directness

(see Searle, 1975, 1979; Ervin-Tripp, 1976; House and Kasper, 1981). According to Blum-

Kulka and Olshtain (1984), three major levels of directness for requests can be identified

cross-linguistically on theoretical grounds: impositives, conventionally indirect requests,

and nonconventionally indirect requests. A finer scale of nine directness categories, based

on these three major levels, was used in the CCSARP, with nine categories ranging from


2 The Polish utterance given by Wierzbicka (1985:152) is ‘‘Dlaczego nie zamkniesz okna?’’.3 Wierzbicka (1985) points to the association of linguistic differences in these languages with cultural features

such as ‘‘spontaneity, directness, intimacy and affection vs. indirectness, distance, tolerance and anti-dogmati-

cism’’ (p. 145). She claims that English reflects a characteristically Anglo-Saxon culture where there is special

emphasis on the rights and autonomy of every individual, tolerance of individual idiosyncrasies and peculiarities.

She describes it as a culture or tradition which respects privacy, approves of compromises and disapproves of

dogmatism (p. 150). Thus, she warns us not to rely only on theories that are based on influential languages, such as

English.

most direct to least direct (or most indirect). Examples from the Blum-Kulka et al.

(1989:279–280) coding scheme (left column) and examples from the Turkish data (right

column) are given in Table 1.

Directness is described by Blum-Kulka et al. (1989:278) as ‘‘the degree to which the

speaker’s illocutionary intent is apparent from the locution.’’ Categorizing Turkish requests

according to the CCSARP coding scheme (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989) has been a challenging

one that is not without problems. Turkish, as an agglutinative language, offers a wide range


Table 1

Blum-Kulka et al.’s (1989) directness categories (from direct to indirect)

1. Mood derivableClean up the kitchen. Mutfagı temizle. ‘Clean the kitchen.’

The menu please. Kız notları versene. ‘Girl, give the notes.’

2. Explicit performativeI am asking you to move your car. Senden bu semineri gelecek hafta

sunmanı rica ediyorum.

‘I am requesting that you give this

presentation next week.’

3. Hedged performativeI must/have to ask you to clean the

kitchen right now.

not found in the Turkish data

4. Locution derivable or obligation statementMadam you’ll have to/should/must/ought

to move your car.

. . . vermelisin ‘You ought to give . . .’

. . . vermen gerekiyor ‘It is necessary

that you give . . .’

. . . verirsin ‘You are going to give . . .’

5. Want statementI’d like to borrow your notes for a little while. . . . yardımınızı bekliyorum ‘I’m waiting

for/expecting your help . . .’

. . . vermenizi istiyorum ‘I want you to give . . .’

. . . verelim ‘Let’s give . . .’

6. Suggestory formulaHow about cleaning up the kitchen? . . . verirsen memnun olurum/ iyi olur

’I’d be glad/It would be good if you give . . .’

7. Preparatory or conventionally indirectCan I borrow your notes? . . . verebilir misin/iz? ‘Can/Could you give . . .?’

I was wondering if you would give me a lift. . . . yardım etmeniz mumkun mu? ‘Is it

possible for you to help . . .?’

8. Strong hint(Intent: getting a lift home) (Intent: make the guest leave)

Will you be going home now? . . . saat 7:30’da yemege davetliyim,

hemen gitmem gerekiyor. ‘. . . I have to

leave soon, I’m invited for dinner at 7:30.’

9. Mild hint(Intent: getting the hearer to clean the kitchen) (Intent: make the guest leave)

You have been busy here, haven’t you? . . . bu aksam yemege davetliyim.

‘. . . tonight I’m invited for dinner.’

of morphological features that contribute to the directness level of request strategies, as, for

example, in the first two utterances above temizle (‘clean’), temizlesene (‘clean’) or even

temizleyelim (‘Let’s clean’). Temizle is a bare imperative while temizlesene can be

described as an ‘‘imperative variant that can have mitigating or aggravating meaning’’

(Huls, 1989:149). There might be a difference in the level of directness due to the suffix

-sene; however, since the illocutionary force is quite clear, I categorized both forms under

mood derivable. On a finer directness scale, these two strategies could occur as separate

categories. The form temizleyelim (‘Let’s clean’) is categorized as a ‘want’ statement.

(According to Blum-Kulka et al. (1989:279), strategies where ‘‘[t]he utterance expresses

the speaker’s desire that the event denoted in the proposition come about’’ are categorized

as want statements). It should be noted that these different forms of request strategies are

inherently not categorical in respect to directness, but should be regarded as lying on a

continuum.

Other request forms such as Mutfagı temizleyebilir misin? (‘Can you clean the

kitchen?’) which question the ability and willingness of the addressee, or the possibility of

the action requested are classified as preparatory or conventionally indirect strategies.

Further on the indirect end of the directness scale are hints. The difference between strong

and mild hints is usually not cleat-cut. Although in both, ‘‘the illocutionary intent is not

immediately derivable from the locution’’, for strong hints ‘‘the locution refers to relevant

elements of the intended and/or propositonal act’’ (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989:280). The

following utterance said in a situation where the host wants to make the guest leave . . .Ihave to leave soon, I’m invited for dinner at 7:30 is categorized as strong hint. The

host states that he or she is invited to a dinner the same evening (7:30) and therefore

has to leave. The word leaving or going mentioned by the host enables the guest to

make an association between the uttered words (i.e., hint) and the desire of the host to

make the guest leave. In contrast, in the utterance I’m invited for dinner at 7:30, taken

by itself, the request is made very indirectly, without mentioning an element relevant

to the illocutionary intent (‘asking the guest to leave’). Therefore, the latter request is

categorized as a mild hint.

Finally, it should be mentioned that the scale aims to measure the directness level

of the speech act itself, i.e., ‘‘the minimal unit which can realize a request’’ (Blum-Kulka

et al., 1989:275) which is referred to as the head act. Additional components, such as

alerters, address terms, grounders (reasons), and other elements needing further attention

are usually dealt with separately in the literature (e.g., House and Kasper, 1981).

3.2. The discourse completion test

The DCT was administered to 230 students at Cukurova University in Turkey, of which

199 responded positively. One hundred and seven of the informants were Turkish–German

bilingual returnees from the German Language Teaching Department while 92 were

monolingual Turkish students from the Turkish Language and Literature Department. Of

the participants 118 were female and 81 male. A short questionnaire attached to the test

was used to obtain background information from the informants. Only students who had

lived and studied in Germany and who defined themselves as bilingual were included in the

study. However, no limits were set for the period of time spent in Germany; this makes it


difficult to generalize the results to all Turkish–German bilinguals. Since time spent away

from a speech community can have an impact on the subjects’ language use, the results

should be interpreted in the light of this information. As for the native Turkish speakers,

only monolingual students were included in the study.

The written test comprised 10 situations of eliciting requests. Five situations were taken

from the CCSARP and translated into Turkish. Five more question items were added

describing a situation more suitable to a Turkish context. The test was piloted with 10

native speakers of Turkish. The following test item (1) is from the CCSARP and describes a

situation of requesting where the response is given; the informants are asked to supply the

appropriate request.

(1) At the University

Ann missed a lecture yesterday and would like to borrow Judith’s notes.

Ann:

Judith: Sure, but let me have them back before the lecture next week.

(Blum-Kulka and House, 1989:14)

Rintell and Mitchell (1989:251) express their concern that the response provided ‘‘might in

some way influence the response other than clarify what was expected’’. Also, in the

CCSARP, just one blank line is provided for the informants’ answers. Therefore, in my

experiments I deleted the response at the end of the dialogue and added several blank lines

in order not to restrict or influence the informants, as in example (2) (see Marti [2000b] for

further details):

(2) At the University

Ebru missed a class the previous day and would like to borrow Meral’s notes.

Ebru:

Since some situations were taken from the CCSARP, this made it possible to compare the

directness levels of the Turkish native speakers in particular situations with the directness

levels of speakers of (some of) the languages in the CCSARP.

As mentioned earlier, although DCTs are not considered suitable for collecting

authentic spoken or ‘real’ time data and their limitations often have been criticized

(Wolfson et al., 1989; Rintell and Mitchell, 1989; Rose, 1994; Yuan, 2001), the ease of

comparing and the possibility of collecting large amounts of data in a short period of time

still seem to be of advantage in providing useful information about the types of semantic or

verbal formulas that Turkish speakers use or might use; thus, DCTs could lead to a better

understanding of authentic communication in Turkish (see Billmyer and Varghese, 2000).

Furthermore, as will be seen in the following sections, a closer examination of the data

shows how informants render the requests more realistic by providing alternative scenarios,

explanations, etc. (see also Lorenzo-Dus, 2001). These ‘extras’, which have not been

observed or which have not been reported in most of the earlier studies, provide a different

perspective on the scale adopted here; this, again, has an impact on the methodology. For

example, Brown and Levinson’s (1987) most indirect superstrategy (‘Avoidance’ of an


FTA) is not covered in the Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) scale. This issue is addressed in the

‘Opting out’ part in section 5.

3.3. Situations and parameters (Table 2)

Situational variation in the CCSARP has been based on the concepts of social distance

and dominance (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989:15). Since some of the situations in my test are

taken from the CCSARP, I initially tried to apply the same definitions of social distance and

dominance, namely familiarity and social power, to the other situations. However, terms

like social distance and dominance/power are usually difficult to define and to apply. In

Situation 5, where a host is asked to request a guest to leave, it was difficult to determine

what the power relationship might be. As Brown and Levinson (1987:78) state, it might be

an option (but not necessarily a solution) to consider power in terms of roles or role-sets

rather than of individuals, in order to possibly weaken undue context-dependency. More

specifically, the Guest situation that I have included in the test might be vague in terms of


Table 2

Summary of situations in the DCT

S1 Kitchen*: Student! student,

Student asks flatmate to clean the kitchen

S2 Notes*: Student! student,

Student asks another student for course notes

S3 Extension*: Student! teacher,

Student asks teacher for an extension (to hand in a project later)

S4 History Teacher*: Teacher! student,

Teacher asks student to give a presentation one week earlier

S5 Guest: Host! guest,

Host asks guest (a friend) to leave because of dinner invitation

S6 Secretary: Student! secretary,

Student asks secretary for a piece of paper

S7 Change: Informant without a specific role! grocer,

The informant asks the shopkeeper to change a bill

S8 Lift*: Informant without a specific role! a couple who are neighbors,

Informant asks a couple (not very familiar) who live on the same street for a lift

S9 Book: Student! teacher,

Student asks teacher to borrow a book

S10 Help: Student! students,

Student asks classmates to donate money for charity in class

The situations in the DCT can be formulated as follows.

Ask (x, y, z) read as ‘x asks y for z’.4

4 Those situations with an * mark are identical with, or similar to the following five situations in the CCSARP:

1. In a Student Flat; 5. At the University; 13. In a Lecturer’s Room; 15. On the Phone; 6. At a Union Meeting.

power relationship, and therefore, leave more room for the informant’s interpretation of the

situation.

Tannen (1981:228) states that there are ‘‘pressures inherent in certain contexts’’. She

mentions ‘hosting’ and ‘visiting’ as one of those situations, which make ‘‘indirectness

more likely’’. Therefore, the Guest situation can be classified as highly face-threatening,

compared to other situations where face loss might not be as high in case a request is

refused. The weight of the face-threat depends, of course, on other factors apart from social

distance and dominance. In contrast, situations such as Situation Change (7), where the

informant is asked to request a grocer to change a bill, may display a more rigid role

constellation where the power relationship would be easier to determine (at least

stereotypically). Such routinized role relationships make for what Hoppe-Graff et al.

(1985) call ‘‘standard situations’’, described as ‘‘often recurring routine situations [where]

the actual input is interpreted and dealt with as ‘following a script’ ’’ (Hoppe-Graff et al.,

1985:90). Clearly, these complexities require more attention; to some extent, they have

been addressed in the literature (e.g., Blum-Kulka and House, 1989; Holtgraves and Yang,

1990; Rinnert and Kobayashi, 1999; Spencer-Oatey, 1992).

3.4. Politeness assessment questionnaire

The main purpose of the politeness assessment questionnaire was to investigate

how polite request strategies with different directness levels were perceived by

Turkish native speakers. The test was piloted twice with five native speakers of Turkish.

The first test included requests from only one situation in the DCT. In the second test,

requests from three different situations were included. The re-designed politeness

assessment questionnaire was administered to 45 undergraduate students at Cukurova

University.

The questionnaire consisted of a total of 47 request strategies. Three different situations

were presented in separate sections, each followed by 15 or 16 request strategies; the

purpose was to determine how polite Turkish speakers rate different request strategies. The

strategies were presented in random order after each situation description. The informants

were asked to rate the strategies on a nine-point scale, from extremely impolite to

extremely polite.

The criterion for the selection of the three situations in the politeness questionnaire was

the average directness level assigned by the Turkish speakers to the DCT situations

(Kitchen – most direct, Guest – least direct, Secretary – medium direct).

Every directness level was represented by at least one request strategy in the politeness

assessment questionnaire (e.g., the most indirect strategies were hints such as The kitchen is

in a mess said to a flatmate who had left the kitchen dirty). The one exception was the

hedged performative, which did not occur in my DCT data at all, and therefore, it was not

included in the questionnaire. In addition, the directness levels could be realized as

strategies only to a certain extent, mainly because of reasons of length.

Another aspect was the internal and external modification of request strategies

produced in the DCT data. An example of an internal modification could be the

downgrader ‘a little’ in the request Could you be a little quieter? Since the measurement of

directness and politeness in this study is limited to the head act, the request strategies had


to be stripped of both internal and external modifications (which is in accordance with

Blum-Kulka’s study, 1987:135).

4. Results

4.1. Directness levels for Turkish monolinguals and Turkish–German bilinguals

The results for all 10 situations as regards to directness for both monolingual Turkish

and bilingual Turkish–German speakers are presented in Table 3. The means of the

directness levels for each group are given in columns 3 and 4.

The overall directness mean for the Turkish monolinguals is 6.17, whereas the overall

directness mean for the Turkish–German bilinguals is 6.31. Comparing the data of the

Turkish–German bilinguals with those of the Turkish monolinguals did not yield any

significant differences pointing to a pragmatic transfer from German. There are only two

situations where such significant differences occur, the Turkish–German bilinguals being

less direct than the Turkish native speakers: Situation 5, where the informant is asked as a

host to request a guest to leave because of a dinner invitation with someone else, and

Situation 8, where the informant is instructed to ask for a lift.

Overall, there seems to be a tendency for both groups to be more or less direct

depending on the situation. Average tests of significance using unique sums of squares

(F = 24.69 on 9,576 degrees of freedom; p < 0.001) demonstrate that situational

variation is significant. For example, in Situation 1 (Kitchen), where a student is asked to

request another student to clean up the kitchen, or in Situation 10 (Help) where the

informant is asked to request money for charity from his or her classmates, both groups

prefer more directness; the reason might be that in both situations, the request is not to

the direct benefit of the requester. The following examples, both the bare imperative


Table 3

Levels of directness for the Turkish monolingual (TM) and Turkish–German bilingual speakers (TG) (1 = most

direct, 9 = least direct)

Request

situation

TM directness

level (mean)

TG directness

level (mean)

Independent sample

t-test p-value

S1 Kitchen 4.55 4.82 0.358

S2 Notes 6.25 6.26 0.973

S3 Extension 6.56 6.81 0.182

S4 History Teacher 5.39 5.37 0.962

S5 Guest 7.53 7.85 0.015*

S6 Secretary 6.83 6.73 0.443

S7 Change 6.50 6.72 0.170

S8 Lift 6.28 6.90 0.001**

S9 Book 6.85 6.89 0.649

S10 Help 4.66 4.65 0.993

Total 6.17 6.31 0.715* Significant at p < 0.05, n (TM) = 92.

** Significant at p < 0.001, n (TG) = 107.

temizle and its variant temizleyiver (‘clean’) occur in Situation 1, Kitchen (examples [3]

and [4], respectively):

(3) Lutfen sorumluluklarını yerine getir ve mutfagı temizle.

Please do your responsibilities and clean the kitchen.

(4) Mutfagı temizleyiver.

Clean the kitchen.

As mentioned before, Turkish being an agglutinative language, a Turkish postponed

(suffixed) verbal morpheme can act as a ‘hedge’ on the illocutionary force of the speech act

verb. The imperative variants can convey a more indirect tone than does the bare imperative

although the illocutionary force is quite clear in each case. While it could be argued that

imperative variants should constitute a separate category, they do not occur too frequently

in my data, such that they do not show a significant difference, even if they are considered

as a separate category.5

In contrast to the direct strategies preferred in Situation 1 (Kitchen), informants

used nonconventional indirect strategies, i.e., hints, in Situation 5 (Guest). In this

situation, the informants are asked to request a guest to leave because of an invitation to a

dinner. Requests are face-threatening acts, and particularly in this situation, where the

face-threat is great, the informants usually preferred an indirect speech act (see example

[5]).

(5) Affedersin. Bu aksam 7:30’da yemege davetliyim. Oraya gitmem gerekiyor.

I’m sorry. Tonight I’m invited to dinner at 7:30. I have to go there.

Conventionally indirect strategies, on the other hand, are preferred in situations where the

social distance between the interlocutors is great, and the informants have to ask for a favor.

This is the case in Situation 6 (Secretary), where the informants are required to ask the

secretary for a piece of paper; in Situation 7 (Change), where the informants are required to

ask the grocer to change a bill; and in Situation 9 (Book), where they are asked to request a

book from the teacher. Conventionally indirect forms such as in examples (6) and (7)

frequently occurred in these situations:

(6) Pardon, bos bir kagıt alabilir miyim acaba?

Excuse me, can I perhaps have a blank piece of paper?

(7) . . . sizden bos bir kagıt almam mumkun mu?

. . . is it possible to get a piece of paper from you?


5 In Situation 1 (Kitchen) and 2 (Notes), where the imperative variants occur the most, an independent sample

t-test was conducted a second time to see whether there was a significant difference between the means when the

imperative variants are classified as a separate category. For Situation Kitchen, the mean for TM is 4.60 and for TG

4.88. The independent sample t-test p-value is 0.314. For Situation Notes, the mean for TM is 6.28 and for TG

6.36. The independent sample t-test p-value is 0.665. Since the p-values are not below 0.05, the differences are not

significant, i.e., the imperative variants do not make a significant change (see Table 3, where the results are

categorized separately).

While the responses show a consistent trend for speakers to agree on how much directness

is required in a particular situation, the question still remains how Turkish speakers

compare, in this respect, to speakers of other languages or cultures. The next section will

deal with this question.

4.2. Cross-cultural comparison of directness levels

As stated earlier, one of the aims of this study is to compare the directness levels of

Turkish speakers with the directness levels of speakers of other cultures, as attested in the

CCSARP. Table 4 below presents the results of Blum-Kulka and House’s (1989:125) study

in four situations, with the interaction conducted in five languages: Hebrew, Canadian

French, Argentinean Spanish, Australian English and German. The results of my own,

earlier study on Turkish are presented in the last column (Marti, 2000a:389).

As can be seen in Table 4, Turkish monolingual speakers prefer a relatively high level of

directness, as do, generally, Spanish and Hebrew speakers. Impositives are frequently used

in all four situations. Moreover, in Situation Lift, Turkish informants tended to choose the

most direct utterances. The following is an example (8) where an imperative is used:


Table 4

Percentage distribution of main request strategy types in four social situations

Situation Strategy type Hebrew Canadian

French

Argentine an

Spanish

Australian

English

German Turkish

Kitchen Impositives 49.1 33.6 74.4 11.6 25.8 67.1

conventional

indirect

41.7 62.5 23.1 72.3 71.2 31.8

hints 9.2 3.9 2.6 16.1 3 1.2

�

Notes Impositives 15.9 6.9 10 2.7 0 20.7

conventional

indirect

82.9 93.1 90 96.9 99.5 78

hints 1.2 0 0 4 0.5 1.2

� �

Lift/ride Impositives 0.6 3.1 0 4 1 20.3

conventional

indirect

85.5 78 100 91.9 97 79.7

hints 13.9 18.9 0 4 2 0

Lecturer/

history

teacher

Impositives 36.7 5.6 36.8 4.1 9.1 43.4

conventional

indirect

60.7 84.7 60.5 91.8 87.8 45.3

hints 2.7 9.7 2.6 4.1 3 11.3

�(�) In the Blum-Kulka and House (1989:125) study, the significance levels for language distributions in each

situation are p < 0.000 (corrected x2). The statistical analysis of my Turkish data shows that there are not always

significant differences between Turkish and the other languages. For each situation, therefore, language

distributions that have not reached significant levels in comparison to Turkish are indicated by a (�). It should

be noted that lack of significance might be due to the small number of speakers of Argentinean Spanish that

participated in Blum-Kulka and House’s study.

(8) Sizi rahatsız etmez isem ve musaitseniz beni de eve bırakın.

Cunku yarın erken kalkmam gerekiyor.

If I don’t bother you and if it’s convenient for you, take me home (as well).

Because I have to get up tomorrow early.

English speakers in Blum-Kulka and House’s experiment, on the other hand, usually opted

for indirect strategies. Similarly, compared to the Turkish speakers, Blum-Kulka and

House’s German speakers employed less directness in all four situations. In general,

English speakers are usually regarded as being more negative politeness oriented,

compared to speakers of Mediterranean languages (see, e.g., Sifianou, 1992:41)6; the

indirectness of the English and the relative directness of Mediterranean cultures here seem

to be in accord with the negative and positive politeness culture distinction.

To conclude, a cross-cultural comparison of the results shows that Turkish speakers

employ high levels of directness in their requests. This study confirms Huls’s (1989) study,

which reports that a Turkish migrant family in the Netherlands used more direct strategies

than Dutch families did; in the same vein, the results of my DCT show no significant

difference between the overall directness level of the Turkish monolingual and Turkish–

German bilingual speakers in their requestive acts. While it is difficult to claim that there is

pragmatic transfer in terms of directness in the speech of bilinguals, still, there were two

situations in which the Turkish–German bilinguals preferred more indirect strategies. This

might be an indication that there is a slight influence from their German into their Turkish.

4.3. Perceived politeness in Turkish requests

In this section, the politeness–indirectness relationship is examined. Turkish

monolingual informants rated how polite they perceive request strategies to be at various

levels of directness (according to Blum-Kulka et al.’s [1989] directness scale) on a nine-

point politeness scale that ranged from extremely polite to extremely impolite. Table 5

presents the politeness means obtained from the politeness questionnaire in three situations

(Kitchen, Guest and Secretary) in the DCT.

The most polite strategy in Situations Kitchen and Secretary is the conventional indirect

(preparatory) category, whereas in Situation Guest it is the explicit performative. An

example of a conventionally indirect request (Situation Kitchen) is found in (9); (10) is an

example of the explicit performative (Situation Guest).

(9) Mutfagı temizleyebilir misin?

Could you clean the kitchen?

(10) Bu aksam 7:30’da yemege davetliyim. Kalkmanı rica ediyorum.

Tonight at 7:30 I’m invited to dinner. I’m requesting you to leave.

A possible explanation for the explicit performative being rated as the most polite strategy

may be the semantics of the verbal expression used: rica etmek (‘to request’) is perceived as


6 Sifianou, however, states that this does not mean that societies can be classified ‘‘as a whole’’ as being either

positively or negatively polite (Sifianou, 1992:39).

representing a pretty polite strategy in all situations. In her dictionary of speech act verbs,

Wierzbicka (1987) provides an exhaustive list of speech acts expressing order, request, ask,

etc. She compares the English verbs request and ask and states that request is the more

polite of the two: ‘‘Ask is direct, personal and informal; request is formal, impersonal,

markedly polite and yet-self-assured’’ (Wierzbicka, 1987:51). Likewise, it can be said that

Turkish rica etmek (‘to request’) is formal and markedly polite, whereas in comparison

istemek (‘to ask, want’) is direct, personal, informal, and less polite. The use of an explicit

performative, the second most direct strategy on the directness scale, shows how direct

strategies may be perceived as very polite, depending on the presence of other (e.g.,

semantic) features.

The results of my politeness rating questionnaire confirm Blum-Kulka’s (1987)

finding that there is no linear relationship between indirectness and politeness. This is

further supported if we look at hints: The most indirect strategies, viz., strong and

mild hints, seem to be scattered almost over all the levels on the politeness scale except

for the extreme ends (most polite and most impolite). Mood derivables, on the other

hand, as the most direct request category, are perceived in all situations as the most

impolite strategies, in accordance with the link postulated by Brown and Levinson (1987)

between indirectness and politeness. These results indicate that while some directness

categories are rather freely movable in relation to the politeness levels, others are

relatively fixed.


Table 5

Politeness means of Turkish requests at different directness levels according to situation

n = 45; S.D.: standard deviation.

4.4. Cross-cultural and cross-language comparison of perceived politeness

Blum-Kulka (1987) conducted a series of tests to investigate native speakers’

perceptions of indirectness and politeness in English and Hebrew with the primary aim to

check whether indirectness and politeness are parallel notions, as argued by, among others,

Brown and Levinson (1987). English and Hebrew native speakers were asked to rate

request strategies taken from the CCSARP data along these two dimensions. The results

show that with regard to the indirectness scale the assumption was confirmed (in both

languages) that the category mood derivables represents the most direct, hints the least

direct way of requesting. As far as politeness is concerned Blum-Kulka’s results are

presented below, together with my own results (see Table 6). A t-test has been performed in

order to compare the means of perceived politeness in Turkish with those for Hebrew and

English as established by Blum-Kulka (1987:137).

With regard to the results, notice first of all that, no single strategy is rated the same in all

three languages. A comparison between Turkish and Hebrew shows that there are

significant differences in the ratings for most of the request strategies. Only the categories

explicit performative, strong hint, and mood derivable receive a similar rating for

politeness in the two languages. Furthermore, when comparing Turkish with English, there

seems to be even less agreement in the perception of requests in terms of politeness. Only

the category mild hint received a similar rating in both languages. This suggests that

Turkish speakers have a different perception of politeness in requests, as it may also be

observed more clearly in Table 7, where the means are ranked according to degree of

politeness in all three languages (from polite to impolite).

On the politeness rating scale used in this study with Turkish informants, the explicit

performative is slightly favored over the preparatory (conventionally indirect) category,

whereas in the Blum-Kulka study, the strategy rated as most polite seems to be the

preparatory. My results do not support Blum-Kulka’s assumed link between politeness and

indirectness for conventional indirectness (cf. her claim that ‘‘politeness and indirectness

are linked in the case of conventional indirectness, but not always in the case of non-


Table 6

Comparison of politeness means of Turkish, Hebrew and English (ranking according to Turkish results from polite

to impolite)

Strategy type (directness level) Turkish Hebrew English

Mean S.D. Mean Mean

2 Explicit performative 6.37 1.97 6.06 4.0*

7 Preparatory 6.35 2.22 7.08* 7.10*

9 Mild hint 5.25 1.52 4.47* 5.33

6 Suggestory formula 4.71 2.31 4.18* 4.25*

4 Locution derivable 4.42 2.31 3.36* 2.84*

8 Strong hint 4.33 2.07 4.38 5.23*

5 Want statement 4.02 1.97 3.2* 3.54*

1 Mood derivable 2.44 1.69 2.3 2.09*

Source of the Hebrew and English data: Blum-Kulka (1987:137). n (Turkish) = 45, n (Hebrew) = 32, n

(English) = 24.* Indicates that the given mean is significantly different from the Turkish mean ( p < 0.005).

conventional indirectness’’; 1987:132). While this claim might hold for Hebrew and

English, my results show that it does not apply to all cases in Turkish. In other words, the

general results of the politeness rating questionnaire for Turkish suggest that

conventionally indirect forms might not be the only (or most) polite strategy for

requestive acts, as can be seen from Table 5, where the explicit performative was rated as

the most polite strategy in Situation Guest. This is not to say that conventional indirect

strategies are not perceived as polite, since conventional indirect forms were perceived to

be the most polite ones in Situations Kitchen and Secretary, as likewise can be observed in

Table 5.

Mild hints have been rated as being close to the more neutral area in all three

languages. Although the category mild hint has been assessed in English as the second

most polite strategy, its mean of 5.33 is close to the ‘neither polite nor impolite’ range of

the nine-point scale. In all languages, strong hints are rated less polite than mild hints.

This is in accordance with the indirectness-politeness link discussed earlier, as strong

hints are more direct than mild hints. In Turkish, as compared to the other languages, there

is a greater gap between the hints: mild hints received a mean of 5.25 and strong hints a

mean of 4.33. The reason for the gap might be that hints of a different nature (such as

could be perceived as accusations) were included in the questionnaire; compare the strong

hint in example (11).

(11) Bu aksam 7:30’da yemege davetliyim. Hemen gitmem gerekiyor.

Tonight at 7:30 I’m invited to dinner. I have to leave.

The host does not just say that there is a dinner to which he is invited, but lets the guest

know that he has to leave. Such an utterance is more face-threatening to the hearer than the

one in example (12), where the host tries to justify the request:

(12) Bu aksam 7:30’da yemege davetliyim ve iptal etmem de imkansız.

Tonight at 7:30 I’m invited to dinner and it’s impossible to cancel it.


Table 7

Politeness ranking of directness categories in Turkish, Hebrew and English

Turkish Hebrew English

Strategy type

(directness level)

Mean Strategy type

(directness level)

Mean Strategy type

(directness level)

Mean

Explicit performative 6.37 Preparatory 7.08 Preparatory 7.10

Preparatory 6.35 Hedged performative 6.34 Mild hint 5.33

Mild hint 5.25 Explicit performative 6.06 Strong hint 5.23

Suggestory formula 4.71 Mild hint 4.47 Hedged performative 5.09

Locution derivable 4.42 Strong hint 4.38 Suggestory formula 4.25

Strong hint 4.33 Suggestory formula 4.18 Explicit performative 4.0

Want statement 4.02 Locution derivable 3.36 Want statement 3.54

Mood derivable 2.44 Want statement 3.2 Locution derivable 2.84

– Mood derivable 2.3 Mood derivable 2.09

Source of the Hebrew and English data: Blum-Kulka (1987:137). n (Turkish) = 45, n (Hebrew) = 32, n

(English) = 24.

In (12), a mild hint, the host does not mention anything having to do with the hint’s

illocutionary intent (such as ‘leave’) and appears to give the guest more options by stating a

reason and not directly saying that he or she has to leave. The interpretation of hints is

highly context-dependent; therefore, it is difficult to guess how hints might be perceived by

hearers in each case. Note, however, that strategies are not inherently polite or impolite. For

instance, hints may be perceived as impolite when addressed to an intimate acquaintance

(see Thomas, 1995:156).

Another difference between the languages seems to be the rating of performatives.7

For Turkish speakers, the explicit performative, and for the Hebrew speakers,

both hedged and explicit performatives occupy the more polite end of the scale,

whereas they are placed in the neutral or even impolite part of the scale by English

speakers. The perception of a performative as a relatively impolite request might

provide evidence (however slight) for a negative politeness oriented culture, as

English is claimed to be (Sifianou, 1992:41). Finally, strategies of the category

want statement and locution derivable are placed in the impolite part of the scale

in all languages. Overall, the results of the politeness rating questionnaire portray a

more complex picture than the ones found in Brown and Levinson (1987) and Leech

(1983).

5. Considering the discourse completion test data in a broader perspective

In the previous sections, indirectness and politeness have been analyzed within the

Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) framework. The nine directness categories, forming the

directness–indirectness continuum, have served as the basis for the analyses of requests in

Turkish. In contrast, the objective in the present section is to evaluate the results of the DCT

in a broader perspective, which will not only cover responses measured according to the

Blum-Kulka et al. directness scale, but also (1) ‘no-responses’, the deliberate choices of the

informants to opt out; (2) alternative solutions; and (3) attempts to negotiate while making

a request.

As mentioned previously, Brown and Levinson’s (1987) strategies range from bald-on

record to off-record FTAs; at the ultimate end of the politeness scale we find the option of

not doing the FTA at all. Likewise, the Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) directness scale attempts

to capture strategies ranging from most direct to most indirect. Unfortunately, the Blum-

Kulka et al. (1989) DCTand its coding scheme is designed to elicit and evaluate only what

is said (i.e., written) and not the unsaid. In other words, it focuses only on the actual

speech act performance of respondents. Yet, there seems to be a number of informants in

my data who have deliberately chosen not to do an FTA. This ‘opting out’ strategy is

viewed by Brown and Levinson (1987) and Bonikowska (1988) as a pragmatic choice.

Here, the responses of the informants to the DCT are viewed and evaluated in a broader

perspective. As can be observed from Table 8, this includes not only the choice of not

performing a requestive act, but also of going beyond this by giving an alternative


7 Hedged performatives were not included in the Turkish test for the reasons mentioned previously.

L.

Ma

rti/Jou

rna

lo

fP

ragm

atics

38

(20

06

)1

83

6–

18

69

18

54

Table 8

Summary of responses (including no-responses) to the DCT by Turkish monolinguals (TM) and Turkish–German bilinguals (TG)

Strategies S 1

Kitchen

S 2 Notes S 3

Extension

S 4 History

Teacher

S5 Guest S 6

Secretary

S 7 Change S 8 Lift S9 Book S 10 Help

TM TG TM TG TM TG TM TG TM TG TM TG TM TG TM TG TM TG TM TG

Impositives (1–5) 57 63 17 17 15 16 23 33 7 2 4 7 14 9 12 4 4 4 45 47

Percentage 62.0 58.9 18.5 15.9 16.3 15.0 25.0 30.8 7.6 1.9 4.3 6.5 15.2 8.4 13.0 3.7 4.3 3.7 48.9 43.9

Conventional

indirect (6–7)

27 35 64 89 61 63 24 38 9 8 82 95 65 88 47 73 80 92 23 23

Percentage 29.3 32.7 69.6 83.2 66.3 58.9 26.1 35.5 9.8 7.5 89.1 88.8 70.7 82.2 51.1 68.2 87.0 86.0 25.0 21.5

Hints (8–9) 1 8 1 – 14 26 6 11 51 87 – 2 33.3 – – 5 – 1 12 18

Percentage 1.1 7.5 1.1 15.2 24.3 6.5 10.3 55.4 81.3 1.9 4.7 0.9 13.0 16.8

Alternative

responses/

opting outs

– – – – – – – 1 ALT – 3 ALT – – 6 ALT 8 ALT – – – – – –

– – – – – – – – 1 OPT 1 OPT – – – – 21 OPT 19 OPT – – 2 OPT –

Percentage 0.9 1.1 3.7 6.5 7.5 22.8 17.8 2.2

No-/nonrelevant

responses (including

mis-understandings)

7 1 10 1 2 2 39 24 24 6 6 3 4 2 12 6 8 10 10 19

1 MIS 21MIS 19 MIS 1 MIS 2 MIS

Percentage 7.6 0.9 10.9 0.9 2.2 1.9 42.4 22.4 26.1 5.6 6.5 2.8 4.3 1.9 13.0 5.6 8.7 9.3 10.9 17.8

Chi-square

likelihood ratio

0.073 0.298 0.277 0.755 0.047* 0.240 0.0578 0.002** 0.524 0.282

ALT: alternative response; OPT: opting out; MIS: misunderstanding.*

Significant at p < 0.05.**

Significant at p < 0.005.

response. In some situations, instead of providing a straightforward request, the

informants came up with such alternative solutions, as when they were required to ask for

change (for a bill), and some of them initiated a small purchase (such as chewing gum) in

order to obtain change.

(13) Bir sekersiz sakız lutfen.

A [package of] chewing gum without sugar, please.

In other cases, informants attempted to negotiate while making a request. The respondents

used strategies to establish common ground or to diminish the imposition of the FTA by

using utterances such as How are you? Good evening. Did you like the concert? You were

also at the concert? as seen in example (14).

(14) Iyi aksamlar. Siz de konserdeydiniz herhalde. Bu arada komsu sayılırız. Sizi surekli

goruyorum. Giderken beni de bırakabilir misiniz?

Good evening. I guess you were also at the concert. By the way, I think we are nei-

ghbors, I frequently see you around. Can you take me as well when you go [home]?

Reponses, especially when provided in a dialogue format, can be viewed as reflections of

the interactive nature of authentic requests. Strategies with instances of negotiative nature,

alternative responses and opting outs are exemplified and explained in subsequent coming

sections.

Table 8 presents a summary of types of categories for Turkish monolinguals and the

Turkish–German bilinguals. A chi-square test was performed to examine whether the

strategy type is independent of linguistic background; in other words, whether the strategy

type profile is different for Turkish monolinguals (TM) and Turkish–German bilinguals

(TG). A significant test value in Table 8 indicates a difference in strategy choice between

the two groups. In the first column of Table 8, the classification of all the responses to the

test are presented in the following order (responses given in raw frequencies and

percentages). The three main directness categories from most direct to most indirect

(impositives, conventionally indirect, hints); alternative responses given by informants

instead of a straightforward request, together with responses of informants who have

deliberately chosen to ‘opt out’; and finally, a ‘no-response’ category for irrelevant

(misunderstood) or missing responses.

In accordance with the previous results, Table 8 reveals that the Turkish monolinguals

and the Turkish–German bilinguals show similar tendencies in most of the situations. For

example, in Situation Kitchen, speakers of both groups use predominantly direct

strategies when requesting a flatmate to clean the kitchen. Similarly, in Situation Guest,

where they were required to ask a guest to leave, even though there is significant difference

between the two groups’ means, both prefer to a great extent nonconventional indirectness

(hints). The figures for this situation, however, also show that the Turkish monolinguals

have a higher percentage in the no-response category. This holds true for the Lift Situation

as well. Could this mean that the Turkish monolinguals are more reluctant to make a

request in such situations?


5.1. Opting out

Yeung (1997) carried out a study on requests in business correspondence in Hong Kong,

where informants were asked to rate the politeness level of requests in English and Chinese

written documents such as letters and memos. The main purpose was to investigate the impact

of relative power (P), social distance (D), and imposition (R) on linguistic choice. Only

imposition was found to be influential in the English data, whereas in Chinese none of the

factors had a significant effect. According to Yeung, this might be due to the importance in

Chinese society of the ‘‘on-record appropriateness’’ and ‘‘reciprocity’’ principles. It is stated

that the decision to make a request depends on whether or not it is appropriate to go on-record

in a particular context and whether the person is ‘‘in the position to do so’’ (Yeung, 1997:518).

According to Yeung, if the appropriateness requirement is not met in that context, the speaker

might either employ off-record strategies or use an intermediary to make the request. The

other influence on requestive behavior, the reciprocity principle (see also Bharuthram, 2003

and Kallen, 2005), implies that ‘‘by making a request, the requester assumes the obligation to

repay the requestee many times over’’ (Yeung, 1997:519). And Yeung continues:

For example, the importance of on-record appropriateness means that the Chinese

have to make a decision whether it is a judicious proposition to make an on-record

request. Once that is decided, they need not redress it in the same way or to the same

degree as their Anglophone counterparts. The strength and prevalence of the

principle of reciprocity in the Chinese context is another complementary factor

explaining this difference in strategy. If one wants to measure the marked effect of

imposition on variation in the Chinese choice of politeness strategies, off-record

strategies should be included as well. (1997:520)

Yeung does not elaborate in her study on what might constitute off-record strategies

(Kallen mentions understatement, irony, rhetorical questions, ellipsis, and silence;

2005:133). Nonetheless, her arguments stress the need to include requestive acts that go

beyond different realisations of speech acts; unfortunately, the ‘extreme’ indirect end of the

scale in particular has been neglected by most studies.

As seen from Table 8, informants have chosen to opt out in three situations: Guest, Lift,

and Help. In Situation Help, for example, one of the informants wrote: I don’t like doing

this type of work, manifesting her unwillingness to do charity work. In Situation Lift,

22.8% of the Turkish monolingual and 17.8% of the Turkish–German bilingual speakers

stated that they would not request a lift in this situation. Some of the informants tried to

justify and explain their choice of opting out (e.g., I do not know the couple well enough);

others simply stated that they would prefer to wait for the bus or call a taxi, as in the

following example (15):

(15) Kesinlikle boyle birsey istemezdim. Otobus iki saat sonra da gelse beklerdim.

Teklifin karsı taraftan gelmesi lazım. Konsere gideceksem, once herseyi

hesaplarım.

I would not ask for such a thing. I would wait even if the bus is in 2 hours. The

offer has to come from the other side. If I want to go to a concert I would take

care of everything beforehand.


These instances show that opting out is an important strategy that speakers can and do

choose. In addition to the deliberate refusals to make a request, there were cases where the

informants left the test items blank.8 In Situation Lift, 13% of the Turkish monolinguals, as

opposed to 5.6% of the Turkish–German bilinguals, gave no-responses, leaving the

relevant lines blank. The no-response and the opting out figures for Situation Lift thus seem

to point in the same direction: together, these strategies make up 35.8% of the data for the

monolinguals and 23.4% for the bilinguals, and show a statistically significant difference

(likelihood ratio x2 = 5.057, likelihood ratio chi-square p-value 0.025, significant at

p < 0.05). Could this mean that the Turkish monolinguals are more reluctant to make a

request, whereas the Turkish–German bilinguals opt out less but prefer indirect strategies?

According to Brown and Levinson (1987), avoidance of an FTA is more indirect than a

‘verbalized’ off-record strategy. This could serve to explain why Turkish–German

bilinguals are perceived as being more direct, disrespectful etc. in a Turkish context. As

Yeung (1997:520) has pointed out, the decision whether or not to make an on-record

request in a particular situation might be just as momentous as it is a decide on the

appropriate request strategy, in particular on the proper degree of directness in formulating

the request. In other words, although the Turkish–German bilinguals use more indirect

requests (just as German speakers do, compared to Turkish speakers), in ‘critical’

situations, the bilinguals may forego the use of the more indirect ‘avoidance’ strategy, and

in this way be perceived as more direct or disrespectful.

Whether the higher rate of no-responses for the monolinguals in this situation is solely

due to their opting out is, of course, open to question. Note, however, that also in Situation

Guest, the no-response rate of the Turkish monolinguals (26.1%) is significantly higher

than that of the Turkish–German bilinguals (5.6%). One possible argument against

considering the no- (or non-relevant) responses as opting out is methodological. Since the

data are not natural, informants might not be interested in making a request in some

particular situation. However, no-response cases occur in all situations and there is no

indication that there is a general tendency of informants not to provide answers to the DCT

items. Moreover, Yuan’s (2001:282) study of Chinese (Kunming) compliments shows that

omissions occur more often in oral DCT responses and in natural conversation, as

compared to written DCT responses.

Another, probably more important argument is that in real life, it is difficult to establish

whether a person prefers not to make (subsidiarily, not to verbalize) a request, or perhaps

will consider using an intermediary (cf. Yeung, 1997); an even greater difficulty is

encountered when we try to figure out whether a prospective addressee is aware that an

interlocutor had the intention to make a request, but did not do it.

A related question is: How do we know that ‘opting out’ is perceived as polite when the

potential addressee is not aware that somebody was going to make a request? This is

undoubtedly a difficult situation to capture. However, one can imagine that avoidance of a


8 It should be mentioned that in Situation Extension, some informants misunderstood the instructions: the task

was to ask the student to present a seminar one week earlier than planned; however, some informants requested

the student to present the seminar a week later than planned. More specifically, 21 Turkish monolinguals (out of

39) and 19 Turkish-German bilinguals (out of 24) misunderstood the task. Thus, more than half of the responses in

this situation were misunderstandings. In contrast, only three misunderstandings occurred in the other two

situations (1 misunderstanding in Situation Guest and 2 misunderstandings in Lift).

request might potentially become apparent later on in situations where the interaction

continues. In Situation Guest, for example, where the potential addressee (the guest)

realizes, at a later point in the conversation, that the host was actually invited to a dinner,

but did not ask the guest to leave, the request avoidance could become apparent and the

host’s behavior be judged as polite. It is not uncommon in Turkish culture to cancel

plans when an unexpected guest arrives. Making a request in such a situation, where a

request is not expected to be made according to the culture, might be marked and extremely

face-threatening.

To sum up, although it seems difficult to pinpoint instances of nonverbalized or avoided

requests and identify the reasons behind them, indirect strategies (off-record and avoidance

of FTAs) play a significant role in as much they constitute part of the norms of a culture.

While the results presented in this section certainly do not warrant major generalizations,

still, they point towards an area that needs further investigation.

5.2. Alternative responses

As mentioned earlier, some of the informants preferred to give alternative responses to

the test items. In this respect, Situation Change stands out among the other situations. Here,

the task was to ask a grocer to provide change for a bill; instead, 14 of the informants chose

to buy something of small value such as a package of chewing gum (for a more

comprehensive study on requests in Turkish service encounters, see Bayyurt and

Bayraktaroglu [2001]). This kind of circumvention of the act is similar to Brown and

Levinson’s (1987) strategy ‘Don’t do the FTA’, though it is more specific; it can be

characterized as ‘Do a less face-threatening FTA’. To my knowledge, none of the studies

presenting the results of the CCSARP have reported or discussed any ‘alternative’

responses. Only in recent studies such as Fredsted (2005), Kallen (2005), and Lorenzo-Dus

(2001), it is mentioned that informants provided non-verbal and paralinguistic cues. The

alternative responses in my data remind us that in real life, speakers are not restricted to

straightforward requesting; on the contrary, they usually have the choice of a variety of

ways to get their message across. For example, in Situation Guest, a few informants

provided an alternative solution for the hearer while making their request (see the

boldfaced portion of example [16]):

(16) Kusura bakma 7:30’da yemege davetliyim gel beraber gidelim.

I’m sorry, I’m invited at 7:30 for dinner, come, let’s go together.

In example (16), the speaker’s message is clear: both speaker and hearer will have to leave

the house. The difference from the other requests made in the same situation is that the

speaker’s act is ‘bivalent’ (see Thomas, 1996): a speech act that is both a request and an

invitation. The invitation, moreover, may compensate the hearer for the inconvenience of

being requested to leave. In another example, (17), the informant invites the guest to stay,

thereby avoiding to have to ask the guest to leave:

(17) Ozur dilerim cıkmam lazım. Siz isterseniz oturabilirsiniz.

I’m sorry, I have to leave now. You [V-form] can stay if you want to.


As these examples demonstrate, a straightforward request may not always be some

informants’ favorite strategy. In example (18), the informant (in the role of a teacher)

negotiates the request and provides, at the same time, options for the hearer. This example

occurs in a context where a teacher is supposed to ask a student to give his presentation a

week earlier:

(18) Murat, senin konunun gelecek haftaya daha uygun oldugunu farkettim. Hocam

yetistirebilirim diyorsan gelecek hafta seminer var. Yok yetistiremem diyorsan

sana konunun yarısını vereyim.

Murat, I have realized that your topic is more suitable for next week. If you

say, ‘‘(my) teacher I can manage to do it’’, then your presentation is next week.

But if you say ‘‘no, I can’t manage this’’, I can give you half of the topic material

[to prepare].

Clearly, the speaker is making a request: the student should do something next week.

However, the difference is that the student is offered a choice between presenting the whole

of the subject matter (if he can manage to prepare it), or only half of the proposed subject

matter (if he says he is not able to prepare it). The choice offered increases Murat’s options

and lowers the face threat of the request.

To sum up, negotiation and alternative responses offered by the informants in my DCT

illustrate the dynamic character of the act of requesting. In the next section, further

complexities are discussed, and examples are presented that demonstrate that requests are

not confined to single speech acts.

5.3. A broader perspective on speech acts

Held (1992:146), talking about structural ‘‘extras’’ such as ‘‘subsidiary actions’’

(Zimmermann, 1984), reflects a linguistic understanding of politeness that goes beyond

the single speech act to include ‘‘a pragmatic mechanism in which a complex chain of

formulated illocutions is involved.’’ Subsidiary actions are described as ‘‘additional

modes of behaviour that have the function of accompanying a dominant action and

supporting its illocution’’ (Held, ibid.). These additional modes of behavior include, for

example, supportive moves such as giving reasons when making a request (so-called

‘grounders’; see further Skewis [2003] on the sequencing of supporting moves).

Importantly, what Held argues for is not limited to supportive moves, but to a ‘‘whole

complex of actions’’ (encompassing actions such as negotiation), and furnishes an

incentive to interpret politeness in a wider perspective, which also takes into

consideration the reaction by, and/or the understanding of, the co-interactant(s) (Held,

1992:146). The following example, (19), due to Thomas (1995), might be a case in point.

The speaker (A) negotiates turn by turn the imposition9 of the request she is going to

make:


9 Thomas (1995:131) points out that pragmatic parameters usually are not given, but have to be negoti-

ated.

(19) A is just going off to University. B is her mother.

A. Mum. You know those browny glasses.

B. Mm.

A. The ones we got from the garage.

B. Mm.

A. Do you use them much?

B. Not really, no.

A. Can I have them then?

(Thomas, 1995:132)

According to Thomas, the whole process is geared towards diminishing the ‘value’ of the

brown glasses. Thus, at the end the speaker can make the request with a less indirect form

(Can I have them then?). In the following example from my DCT, an attempt is made by the

informant not to diminish the imposition, but to reduce social distance between him- or

herself and the hearer in Situation Lift:

(20) Iyi aksamlar, nasılsınız? Konseri begendiniz mi? Benim cok hosuma gitti. Acaba

rica etsem beni de sizin sokagın basına kadar goturebilir misiniz?

Good evening. How are you? Did you like the concert? I really liked it. Perhaps, if I

make the request, Could you take me somewhere near the beginning of your street?

The questions How are you?, Did you like the concert? and the subsequent answer I really

liked it, are ways to find ‘common ground’ (a positive politeness strategy; see Brown and

Levinson, 1987). In natural conversation, these utterances would normally enable the

speaker to work towards a point where he or she could make the request; this also describes

what subsidiary actions do: they work turn by turn towards the goal, while taking the

interactant’s reactions into consideration.

This link between turn-taking and speech act realization is displayed more explicitly in

the following examples. (21a,b), where an informant’s response is in the form of a dialogue

rather than of a single-move request:

(21a) Murat: Alo.

Hoca: Alo, Murat, ben tarih ogretmenin Suna Yılmaz.

Murat: Merhaba, hocam nasılsınız?

Hoca: Iyiyim, ya sen?

Murat: Tesekkurler.

Hoca: Murat, odevini bir hafta once hazırlamanı istiyorum.

Murat: Hello

Teacher: Hello Murat, this is your history teacher Suna Yilmaz.

Murat: Hello, how are you (my) teacher?

Teacher: I’m fine, and you?

Murat: Thanks.

Teacher: Murat, I want you to prepare your work a week earlier.

The above dialogue represents a telephone conversation where the ringing of

the telephone is the first part (the summons) of the opening sequence, and


Murat’s Hello in line 2 the answer to the summons, and so on, as follows (cf. Schegloff,

1986):

(21b): 1 (the phone rings)

2 Murat: Hello

3 Teacher: Hello Murat, this is your history teacher Suna Yilmaz.

4 Murat: Hello, how are you (my) teacher?

5 Teacher: I’m fine, and you?

6 Murat: Thanks.

7 Teacher: Murat, I want you to prepare your work a week earlier.

The summons-answer sequence (lines 1–2) is followed by a greeting-greeting sequence

(lines 3–4), a question–answer exchange (lines 4–6), and finally the teacher’s request (line

7). In other words, the greeting and the phatic question–answer exchanges that precede the

actual request are positive politeness strategies (Brown and Levinson, 1987) whose

function mainly is to establish a common ground for the participants. As was the case

in example (19), because of these preparations, the informant here (in the role of the

teacher) is able to use a quite direct strategy in the actual request in line 7; this shows the

importance of negotiation prior to a request (in what is called ‘pre-sequences’; see Mey,

2001:144–145). Held (1992) argues that within an interactive mechanism, the face-

threatening act, instead of being realized directly (e.g., by a single request), may be

completely substituted by subsidiary actions. In other words, a chain of actions (for

example, in negotiation) could replace ‘the head act’, the dominant action (or ‘nucleus’)

which realizes the speech act.

In a broader perspective, moving beyond the limited categorization of directness

proposed by Blum-Kulka et al. (1989), my DCT examples are a source of valuable data

documenting speakers’ alternative ways of getting their messages across. The following

example, (22), shows the informant’s response in the Guest Situation, where the task was to

request the guest to leave:

(22) I would phone the people who have invited me and say the following loud

enough so that the guest would hear it and decide to leave:

Hello, this is Cilem, a guest has (just) arrived, I might be a bit late.

As can be observed here, the speaker prefers an off-record strategy (i.e., a hint) to

convey the illocutionary intent. This particular off-record strategy differs from the

others in the rest of the data in that it does not directly address the target person present

in the situation. Instead, the speaker ‘creates’ a second addressee (a telephone

interlocutor), who then is ‘informed’ about the current situation. These type of

utterances with multiple functions are referred to by Thomas (1985) as multivalent

illocutionary acts, since they have at least two different forces, aimed at two different

addressees. Multivalence is defined by Thomas as ‘‘a single utterance performing two

different illocutionary acts either for different receivers within the same discourse role

[. . .] or different receivers within different discourse roles’’ (1985:17). In other words,

the host by (potentially) informing the person on the phone about the situation is


indirectly requesting the guest to leave. This particular example makes it clear that the

directness of a request is also affected by how the request orients to the participants.

Moreover, it shows that the indirect end of the directness/indirectness scale needs

further examination.

6. Conclusion

The focus of this study was on indirectness. The first step was to explore what

indirectness involves, in other words whether indirectness and politeness are related

concepts. The results of this study are generally in accordance with Blum-Kulka’s (1987)

finding that there is no linear relation between indirectness and politeness. Although

indirectness and politeness are strongly connected concepts, other factors, such as the

semantic meaning of the expressions used to formulate a request can sometimes override

the indirectness factor (see Bayyurt [2000], Bayyurt and Bayraktaroglu [2001], and Marti

[2000b] for other factors such as formality affecting perceived politeness in Turkish). Thus,

it seems to be necessary to view these two concepts separately.

Cross-cultural comparison appeared to be a prerequisite for investigations on a possible

pragmatic transfer from German into the Turkish of returnees. Comparing Turkish with

five of the cultures represented in the CCSARP situations showed that generally, Turkish

speakers adopt quite direct strategies. This is also the case when Turkish speakers are

compared to German speakers, who usually prefer indirect strategies. In addition, the

findings of this study confirm Huls’ (1989) results that Turkish (immigrant) speakers, in

comparison to Dutch speakers, employ more direct strategies.

In regard to overall directness in requests, no significant difference could be found

between the Turkish monolinguals and the Turkish–German bilinguals. Only in two

situations (Guest and Lift) did the Turkish–German bilinguals opt for indirect strategies,

which might be an indication that there is a slight influence from German on their Turkish.

It should be noted, however, that these results cannot be generalized to all Turkish–

German bilinguals; such a generalization would have required a rigorous selection of the

bilingual speakers. In particular, while students who lived and studied in Germany and

who defined themselves as bilinguals, were included in the study, no limit was set for the

time they had spent in Germany. Even so, the results provide insight into the native Turkish

and Turkish–German bilingual speakers’ tendency to use direct or indirect requests in

various situations.

With regard to the broader perspective alluded to above, if one moves beyond the

Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) directness scale (which covers only the ‘said’, but not the

‘unsaid’), a different picture emerges. Informants not only use various off-record

strategies such as multivalent illocutionary acts, but also deliberately opt out, find

alternative solutions, or use their discourse resources to lead up to a speech act, all of

which reveals the dynamic nature of requests. When the data were re-analyzed, in some

situations, the Turkish monolinguals showed a higher opting out rate than did the

Turkish–German bilinguals. This suggests that there might be a tendency for the Turkish

monolinguals to be more reluctant to make a request, whereas the Turkish–German

bilinguals opt out less, but employ more indirectness. Overall, despite the drawbacks of


dealing with elicited data, the informants provided valuable data which helped to shed

light on the indirect end of the directness continuum, including the strategy of ‘avoiding

an FTA’.

Acknowledgments

I am truly grateful to Jonathan Culpeper for his suggestions and comments, to Jenny

Thomas for providing me with the CCSARP questionnaire, to the Editor and the

anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. Special thanks to F. Ozden Ekmekci

and Yasemin Bayyurt for their guidance and encouragement. Needless to say, any errors

remain my own responsibility.

Appendix A

Discourse completion test1. Ogrenci Evinde

Mehmet Levent’in ev arkadasıdır. Levent bir onceki gece parti vermistir.

Mutfak darmadagın bir haldedir.

Mehmet: Levent, bu aksam Eda’yla Mustafa yemege gelecekler, ayrıca

birazdan yemek isiyle ugrasacagım

2. UniversitedeEbru bir onceki gunun dersini kacırmıstır, bu yuzden Meral’in ders notlarını

istemektedir.

Ebru:

3. Ogretim Gorevlisinin odasındaSuleyman ertesi gune olan odevini yetistiremeyecektir. Suleyman,

hocası Selim Calıskan’la gorusmeye karar verir.

Suleyman:

4. TelefondaSuna Yılmaz tarih ogretmenidir. Basladıkları okul donemi icin ders programını

hazırlamaktadır. Iki hafta sonra Murat adında bir ogrencisi sınıfta ‘Karahanlılar’

konusunda kucuk bir seminer verecektir. Suna Hanım Murat’ın seminer

konusunun gelecek haftanın programına daha uygun oldugunu farkeder ve

Murat’ı aramaya karar verir:

5. MisafirSaat 6:30’dur ve siz 7:30’da yemege davetlisiniz. Cok samimi olmadıgınız

bir arkadasınız davetsiz olarak size oturmaya gelmistir. Hazırlanıp gitmeniz

gerekiyor. Arkadasınızın kalkmasını istiyorsunuz:


6. SekreterlikteUniversitede ogrencisiniz. Acil bir dilekce yazmanız gerekiyor. Bolumunuz

sekreterinden bos bir kagıt isteyeceksiniz:

7. Bozuk paraBozuk paraya ihtiyacınız var. Az ilerde bir bakkal dukkanı gordunuz. Iceri

girip para bozduracaksınız:

8. KonserAksam konserden cıktınız. Otobuse binmeyi planlıyordunuz, fakat otobusun

gelmesine daha bir saat var. Sizinle aynı cadde uzerinde oturan, fakat pek

tanısmadıgınız arabalı bir cifti gordunuz. Sizi de eve bırakmalarını

isteyeceksiniz:

9. KitapOdeviniz icin gerekli olan bir kitabı kutuphanede bulamadınız. Aradıgınız kitap

hocanızda var. Kitabı hocanızdan isteyeceksiniz:

10. YardımOkulunuzun Kızılay kolunda gorevlisiniz. Fakir ogrenciler icin para toplamayı

amaclıyorsunuz. Sınıftaki arkadaslarınızdan yardım isteyeceksiniz. (Sınıfta):

Discourse completion test (English translation)

1. In a Student FlatLevent, Mehmet’s flatmate, had a party the night before and left the kitchen in

a mess.

Mehmet: Levent, Eda and Mustafa are coming to dinner tonight and I’ll have to

get on with the cooking soon

2. At the UniversityEbru missed a class the previous day and would like to borrow Meral’s notes.

Ebru:

3. In a Lecturer’s OfficeSuleyman’s assignment is not ready on time, so he decides to see his tutor,

Selim Calıskan, a day before the deadline.

Suleyman:

4. On the PhoneSuna Yılmaz teaches history. When preparing her classes for the next few

weeks, she realises that a short presentation on ‘the Karahans’ which is due in

two weeks time would fit in much better at next week’s session. She decides

to give her student, Murat, a ring:


5. GuestIt is 6:30 and you have been invited out to dinner at 7:30. You have an unexpected

visitor. You have to get ready and leave for the dinner. You ask your visitor to leave:

6. At the Secretary’s OfficeYou are a university student. You urgently need to write a letter of application.

You ask your departmental secretary for a piece of paper:

7. ChangeYou need some change. You can see a grocery shop nearby. You go in and ask to

change a bill:

8. ConcertThe concert is over. You were planning to take the bus, but you have to wait for

an hour. You see a couple (whom you don’t know very well) who have a car and

who live on the same street as you. You ask for a lift:

9. BookYou could not find an important book for your essay in the library. You ask your

teacher who has the book you are looking for:

10. HelpYou work in the charity group (Red Cross/Crescent) of your school. The aim

is to collect money for poor students. You ask your classmates for help.

(In the class):

Appendix B. Politeness assessment questionnaire

Politeness scale used in the politeness assessment questionnaire:

The questionnaire included the following 47 request strategies in Turkish (Situation

Kitchen – 16; Situation Guest – 15; and Situation Secretary – 16):

A. Situation KitchenMehmet: Levent, Eda and Mustafa are coming to dinner tonight and I’ll

have to get on with the cooking soon

1. Mutfagı temizler misin? Are you cleaning/Do you clean

the kitchen?

2. Mutfagı temizleyelim. Let’s clean the kitchen.


3. Mutfagı temizle. Clean the kitchen.

4. Mutfagı temizleyebilir misin? Could you clean the kitchen?

5. Mutfagı temizleyiver. Just clean the kitchen.

6. Mutfagı temizlersen memnun olacagım. I’ll be glad if you clean the kitchen.

7. Bana mutfagı temizlemede yardım et. Help me with the cleaning of

the kitchen.

8. Mutfagı temizlemeni rica ediyorum. I’m requesting that you clean

the kitchen.

9. Mutfagı temizlesene. Just clean the kitchen.

10. Mutfak da epeyce kirlenmis. The kitchen got quite dirty.

11. Mutfagı temizlemen gerekiyor. It’s necessary that you clean

the kitchen.

12. Mutfagı temizlemeni istiyorum. I want you to clean the kitchen.

13. Mutfagı temizlesen iyi olur. It’d be good if you clean the kitchen.

14. Levent, bu aksam Eda’yla Mustafa

yemege gelecekler, ayrıca birazdan

yemek isiyle ugrasacagım.

Levent, Eda and Mustafa are coming

to dinner tonight and I’ll have to get

on with the cooking soon.

15. Mutfagı temizlemen mumkun mu? Is it possible that you clean

the kitchen?

16. Bu ne dagınıklık? What’s this mess?

B. Situation GuestBu aksam 7:30’da yemege davetliyim . . .. Tonight at 7:30 I’m invited

to dinner . . ..1. Kalkman mumkun mu? Is it possible for you to go?

2. Kalksan iyi olur. It’d be good if you go.

3. Hemen gitmem gerekiyor. I have to go now.

4. Kalk. Go. (T-form)

5. Sakıncası yoksa gidebilir miyim? Is it OK if I go?

6. Kalkabilir misin? Could you go?

7. Kalkman gerekiyor. It’s necessary that you go.

8. Beraber kalkalım. Let’s go together.

9. Kalkarsan memnun olacagım. I’ll be glad if would you go.

10. Kalkmanı istiyorum. I want you to go.

11. Bu aksam 7:30’da yemege davetliyim. Tonight at 7:30 I’m invited

to dinner.

12. Kalkar mısın? Are you leaving?/Do you leave?

13. Baska bir zaman gelsen olur mu? Can you come another time?

14. . . . ve iptal etmem de imkansız. . . . and it’s impossible to cancel.

15. Kalkmanı rica ediyorum. I’m requesting that you go.

C. Situation SecretaryExcuse me. I have to write an application letter.

1. Bos bir kagıt vermenizi istiyorum. I want you to give me a piece

of paper.


2. . . . fakat sadece kalemim var. . . ., but I have got only a pen.

3. Bos bir kagıt var mı? Is there a piece of paper?/Do you

have a piece of paper?

4. Bos bir kagıt versenize. Just give me a piece of paper.

5. Bos bir kagıt alabilir miyim? Could I have a piece of paper?

6. Bos bir kagıt verir misiniz? Are you giving/Will you give me a

piece of paper?

7. Bos bir kagıt rica ediyorum. I’m requesting a piece of paper.

8. . . . fakat kagıdım yok. . . ., but I haven’t got a piece

of paper.

9. Bos bir kagıt vermeniz gerekiyor. It’s necessary that you give me a

piece of paper.

10. Bos bir kagıt vermeniz mumkun mu? Is it possible for you to give me a

piece of paper?

11. Bos bir kagıt verirseniz

memnun olacagım.

I’ll be glad if you would give me

a piece of paper.

12. Bos bir kagıt verebilir misiniz? Could you give me a piece

of paper?

13. Bos bir kagıt veriverin. Just give a piece of paper.

14. Bos bir kagıt rica edebilir miyim? Can I request a piece of paper?

15. Bos bir kagıt verirseniz iyi olur. It’d be good if you could give me a

piece of paper.

16. Bos bir kagıt verin. Give a piece of paper.

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Leyla Marti is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Foreign Language Education at Bogazici

University, Istanbul, Turkey. She received her PhD degree in Linguistics from Lancaster University in March

2000. She previously worked in the ELT Section at Cukurova University, Adana. Her main research interests

include pragmatics, sociolinguistics, cross-cultural communication, and bilingualism.


Documents

Indirectness and politeness in Turkish–German bilingual and Turkish monolingual requests