The Perception of Indirectness and Politeness in American English

This study is part of the collaborative graduate research project, 'The Art of Requesting', conducted within the English Department at Leibniz University Hannover. Drawing on Brown and Levinson’s Politeness Theory, it is a modified replication of Blum-Kulka’s (1987) study on indirectness and politeness in requests. The study examines how speakers of American English perceive indirectness and politeness across six different request strategies in a range of contextualised scenarios. These scenarios vary systematically in terms of power and social distance, enabling an investigation into how these contextual factors influence perceptions of indirectness and politeness. The study also considers the influence of age and gender on these perceptions.