Imperatives and politeness in Dutch
Abstract Imperatives are usually thought of as direct and therefore impolite. However, imperatives such as Have some coffee, Enjoy your holiday , or Sleep well are not considered impolite. The reason seems to be that these imperatives refer to actions that are beneficial to the hearer only. We make a distinction between two types of imperatives, those referring to actions that are beneficial to the speaker and those that are beneficial to the hearer. We have conducted an experiment in order to examine the relation between the two types of imperatives and how they are perceived by speakers of D... Mehr ...
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Dokumenttyp: | Artikel |
Erscheinungsdatum: | 2016 |
Reihe/Periodikum: | Linguistics in the Netherlands ; Linguistics in the Netherlands 2016 ; volume 33, page 41-53 ; ISSN 0929-7332 1569-9919 |
Verlag/Hrsg.: |
John Benjamins Publishing Company
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Schlagwörter: | Linguistics and Language / Language and Linguistics |
Sprache: | Englisch |
Permalink: | https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-27047324 |
Datenquelle: | BASE; Originalkatalog |
Powered By: | BASE |
Link(s) : | http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/avt.33.04hoo |
Abstract Imperatives are usually thought of as direct and therefore impolite. However, imperatives such as Have some coffee, Enjoy your holiday , or Sleep well are not considered impolite. The reason seems to be that these imperatives refer to actions that are beneficial to the hearer only. We make a distinction between two types of imperatives, those referring to actions that are beneficial to the speaker and those that are beneficial to the hearer. We have conducted an experiment in order to examine the relation between the two types of imperatives and how they are perceived by speakers of Dutch. The results show that there is indeed a significant difference in interpretation between the two types of imperatives in Dutch. In addition, we have tested the effects of adding a politeness marker alsjeblieft ‘please’ or discourse particles to the imperatives.