1887
Volume 20, Issue 3
  • ISSN 1018-2101
  • E-ISSN: 2406-4238

Abstract

This study makes use of elicited request speech act data in Finnish to view variability of personal perspective and T/V forms across a variety of situations. The speakers exhibited a great deal of congruency when they were scripted as addressing someone familiar, being in a position of equal or higher status than the interlocutor, and when the request was considered a low imposition. In such situations, speakers tended to use a second person perspective, with informal T/V forms. The Finnish T-forms were found to be the default form, showing up in half of the request utterances. The Finnish V-forms showed up in only 10 percent of the requests. A variationist analysis using Varbrul complemented the main findings, but was found to not be a reliable tool for elicited pragmatic data, using sociopragmatic factors as independent variables.

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2010-01-01
2024-12-04
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/content/journals/10.1075/prag.20.3.05pet
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): Finnish; Forms of address; Perspective; Pragmatic variation; Requests; Speech acts
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