Translating Politeness Across Englishes by Rehana Mubarak-Aberer

Author:Rehana Mubarak-Aberer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Peter Lang AG
Published: 2017-06-06T11:51:33+00:00

5.5 Survey Analysis196

5.5.1 Data collection

The survey was created with the survey creation tool “SurveyMonkey”. It was distributed to 601 respondents as a link, and to 283 respondents as an e-mail attachment or print out. All participants have in common that they always or often use English in their daily professional lives. To enhance transparency and comparability of data, without neglecting the transculturality of today’s societies197, the survey consisted of two parts:

In the first part, multiple-choice questions regarding the lingua-cultural, educational and professional biographies were asked, in order to identify groups of participants with similar lingua-cultural biographies.

The second part of the survey consisted of multiple-choice questions with incorporated options for discourse completion. In order to analyze the distribution of modal expressions to encode modality in requests, six situations were←72 | 73→ presented. In the first three situations, the respondent was asked to imagine he or she were a member of a customer service staff and had to make a request to a customer. The respondent was given ten options of requesting for each situation and the possibility to enter their own phrasing. These three situations were used to elicit patterns of politeness realization. In the second set of three situations, the respondent was asked to imagine he or she were a customer and received a request by a company’s customer service staff. The respondent was again given ten options and asked to check the answer that he or she would perceive as most polite or to write his or her own phrasing. These three situations were used to elicit patterns of politeness perception.

For all six simulated situations, the ten given options expressed the same propositional content; however, they contained different nuances of modality: epistemic possibility, epistemic necessity, deontic permission, deontic obligation, dynamic ability and dynamic willingness.

In the subchapters below, the most striking results will be presented. For this, a graphical overview over the preferred modal meaning by the focus groups will be shown. Then, as a second step, we will take a closer look at how the modal meaning is realized. For this, those levels of modal meaning, which were chosen by a minimum of 15 participants of at least one FG, are presented in charts and the observations with regard to the distribution of modal expressions on each level and the co-occurrence of modal meaning with request strategies and perspectives are described.

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