Utilitarian relevance and face management in the interpretation of ambiguous question/request statements.
Often, requests are made in an indirect manner and phrased in such a way that they can also be construed as questions. For example, the sentence "Is there any coffee left?" can be construed either as a question about coffee or as a request for coffee. This article offers a combined test of some key predictions of two approaches to the disambiguation of question/request statements: (1) the face management approach, which gives a prominent role to variables such as status and potential loss of face; and (2) the utilitarian relevance approach, which gives a prominent role to the goals pursued by the speaker at the time he or she issues the statement. Ambiguous question/request statements provide a natural test bed for the latter approach in particular. A board game paradigm is developed to allow for a clean, orthogonal manipulation of all variables. The results wholly support the utilitarian relevance approach and offer new perspectives on the face management approach.
Demeure
Virginie
V
CNRS and Université de Toulouse, Toulouse, France. demeure@univ-tlse2.fr
Bonnefon
Jean-François
JF
Raufaste
Eric
E
D000328:Adult; D003071:Cognition; D005145:Face; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012660:Semantics