Politeness is Distance – Serbian Requests through the Mirror of the Cognitive Speech Act Scenario Model

Abstract

Our analysis was based on the theoretical model of speech act scenarios proposed by Panther & Thornburg (1998, 2003, 2004). We identified the components of the scenario in Serbian requests, showing that speakers most frequently resort to the BEFORE component in formulations of indirect requests implying the ability/capacity and willingness of the hearer to perform the act, with only sporadic instances of the RESULT and AFTER components. When it comes to the CORE component, our results show that Serbian possesses various linguistic means to express direct requests, in the first place by performative formulas, apart from the imperative proper. Further on, we make a synthesis of the two principal approaches within cognitive linguistics, the scenario approach and the propositional ICM approach, in order to account for the politeness effects produced by the mutual influence of sociocultural variables and the linguistic content of the utterance. Also, we observed certain inconsistencies in the application of the cognitive models, particularly in the domain of non-conventionalised indirect speech acts.