POLITENESS JUDGMENTS IN PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS

Brown and Levinson's politeness theory specifies five strategies for a chieving politeness. Although the strategies are presented as ordered and mutually exclusive, there is reason to believe that they are neith er The authors offer an alternative means of classifying requests that is grounded in the phenomenology of the social actor and depends on t hree message features: explicitness, dominance, and argument. Separate samples of judges viewed video clips of one college student attemptin g to influence another and provided judgments of politeness (n = 100), explicitness and overall dominance (n = 435), linguistic dominance (n = 80), or argument (n = 60). A regression analysis predicting politen ess was conducted using message as the unit of analysis. The results s howed a strong, negative relationship between politeness and dominance and weaker;positive associations with explicitness and argument.