POLITE REQUESTS, GENDER, ETHNICITY AND AGE Polite Requests, Gender, Ethnicity and Age Aiko Nakamura I was

born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, and had an opportunity to live in the United

States for a few years, during which I acquired English. As a bilingual speaker of Japanese and English who is more fluent in Japanese, I have struggled how to show politeness in the latter language. Especially with the experience of working as a business person wearing a suit everyday in Tokyo, the very strong importance and emphasis put on using correct polite forms in Japanese has been intriguing for me. Prompted by these thoughts, I decided to see if ethnic background influences the expression of politeness in English as well as gender as it is one of the major focus when it comes to discussing politeness in language. When it comes to speech acts in Japanese where politeness is invariably expressed, a service encounter is one of the most prominent locations. Expecting the same, I chose a caf as a site to observe speech acts in English. Then, the aim of this study narrowed down to examining the linguistic variation of polite requests that customers make to employees when ordering at a coffee shop. The independent variables were first gender (male or female) and ethnicity (Asian or Caucasian) of customers. However, as I conducted observations, I realized that age played a significant role in the choice of polite requests. Hence, I decided to include age (20s~30s, 40s~50s, 60s above) of customers as another variable. The dependent variable is the manner of politeness when making requests to employees. The results were striking in that there was no significant difference with gender in the frequency of polite requests but there was with age. The theory of performativity on gender was legitimized with this phenomenon. Ethnicity yielded an interesting result that almost all Asian background customers used one form of polite request while Caucasian background customers used more evenly on all forms. The Communication

POLITE REQUESTS, GENDER, ETHNICITY AND AGE Accommodation Theory as well as different cultural norms of politeness and face threatening acts seemed to attribute to the different frequency of polite requests by age and ethnicity. Below, I will review previous studies pertaining to the correlations between gender

difference and politeness, and ethnicity difference and politeness. First, I will explain the major concepts of politeness: face work, positive and negative politeness, and Face Threatening Acts/ Prime Face threatening Acts introducing a cross-cultural aspect. Then, I will discuss the previous works on gender and politeness. Finally, I will discuss my aim for incorporating these concepts to investigate on the speech acts between customers and employees at a coffee shop. Politeness and Ethnicity Goffman (2006) introduced the concept of face that it is the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact(p.299). People have their own positive face when interacting with others and by nature they endeavor to maintain it by employing poise, that is, the capacity to suppress and conceal any tendency to become shamefaced during encounters with others (Goffman, 2006, p.300). It is the act innate in all social interactions during which people implement various measures to act consistently with their face, which is called face-work. Goffman (2006) also maintains that when it is explained what a person or culture is like, usually it is the repertoire of such face-saving acts that people refer to, which partly underlines the different linguistic discourses the customers show when interacting with employees at a caf described by different ethnic backgrounds. In the course of face-work, there are two different kinds of face that people employ: positive and negative face. Brown and Levinson (2006) indicate that positive face is used when one desires to be accepted by others, whereas negative face is used when one desires to not be impeded by others. Hence, positive politeness is when a speaker orients his/her wants toward the hearers wants by treating the hearer as somebody close to you such as a member of the

POLITE REQUESTS, GENDER, ETHNICITY AND AGE speakers community, a friend or a family. By contrast, negative politeness is when a speaker

orients toward a hearers wants to maintain his/her own territory and not be impeded by others. When an employee asks a customer, How are you doing today? and a customer replies, Good, its such a good weather today, I had to take a walk to the Warf!, the employee is expressing positive politeness, and the customer is showing a positive face, responding to the employees question by sharing his/her personal life. Conversely, if the customer replies only Good, how are you? and the employee responses back, Good, what can I get you?, it can be said that the customer has a negative face, responding politely to complete a conventional adjacency pair of a greeting but not letting the employee intrude on his/her personal realm, and the employee showing negative politeness to the customer by not asking more. Another crucial concept Brown and Levinson (2006) draw is the Face Threatening Acts (FTAs), which are certain kinds of acts [that] intrinsically threaten face, namely those acts that by their nature run contrary to the face wants of the addressee and/or of the speaker (p.313). The acts that threaten a negative face are when a speaker does not avoid impeding a hearers freedom of action such as orders, requests, suggestions, advice, remindings, threats, warnings, dares, compliments, etc. The acts that threaten positive face are when a speaker does not care about what a hearer wants or desires such as expressions of disapproval, criticism, contempt or ridicule, contradictions or disagreements, challenges, etc. At a caf, if an employee tells a customer How are you? Oh I love your nails!, it can be said that the employee is threatening the customers negative face by mentioning something that a hearer might not be touched upon. Pertaining to the notion of FTAs, Conlan (2005) came up with a term Primary Face Threatening Acts (PFTAs) to refer to any speech acts by means of which an overriding pragmatic goal is attempted (p.132). He agrees with Brown and Levinson that all speech acts

POLITE REQUESTS, GENDER, ETHNICITY AND AGE

involve a face-threatening activity but emphasizes that there are always FTAs to appropriately prepare the way for, and mitigate the force of the weightier FTAs in the end, which is the PFTA. From this point of view, the whole speech event can be broken into four different levels labeled in order as: Opening Acts, Establishing Acts, Signalling Acts, and PFTA realization (Conlan, 2005, p.135). Although the regular discourses between a customer and an employee at a caf to request for a drink does not usually take up the whole four levels of speech acts because it is not face threatening for an employee to be ordered to make customers a coffee as it is their duty, depending on their relationship a discourse as below can be analyzed with this perspective. When a customer orders a drink to an employee, he/she might say Hi, how are you?, and an employee replies, Good, thank you. What can I get you today?, then the customer finally orders, Yes, I am feeling like getting something sweet today, the employee responses, well, we have all kinds of sweet lattes, or hot chocolate, if youd like, then the customer finally requests, Okay, can I get a caramel latte? In this case, the first speech act of the customer asking the employee, How are you? is an pre-FTA Opening Act, and when the employee replies the question saying Good, thank you, and asks the customer what he/she would like to get, they are pre-FTA Establishing Acts in which the relative power and distance values of the interaction are established (Conlan, 2005, p.135). Then as the customer utters, Yes, I am feeling, and the employee suggests drinks, they are pre-FTA Signalling Acts, in which the speaker, the customer is signaling that a PFTA is about to be performed, and the hearer, the employee, is acknowledging it. Finally, the PFTA is realized by the customer when a caramel latte is requested. It can be said that this final request of PFTA that the customer makes to order a coffee is mitigated in its force by the preceding four levels of FTAs compared to having none of them before the PFTA and the coffee is ordered abruptly. Conlan maintains that this face-saving discourse management prior to the performance of PFTAs has

POLITE REQUESTS, GENDER, ETHNICITY AND AGE

been recognized by many researchers, notably in the realm of cross-cultural speech acts study. As a matter of fact, one of his studies prove that Asian speakers of English tend to omit the preceding FTAs, and directly perform PFTAs while the Western speakers tend not to. Politeness and Gender OBarr and Atkins (2009) did an influential work investigating on womens language in court. This term was claimed by Robin Lakoff to indicate that women talk in a certain way different from men characterized by such features as wider intonation contours, more hedging and use of expressive forms like adjectives, and more attention to linguistic correctness, etc. Lakoff (1998) maintains in his study that this particular language submerges a womans personal identity, by denying her the means of expressing herself strongly, on the one hand, and encouraging expressions that suggest triviality in subject matter and uncertainty about it (p. 243). However, what OBarr and Atkins (2009) found was that such style of speech is not limited to women but is also spoken by the men of lower class as well, and that, conversely, women of higher class speak in a certain style that men of higher class speak. Hence, they rephrased womens language as powerless language versus powerful language. In other words, the ways in which one style of language is used over the other does not necessarily has to do with gender, but more to do with social power. Cameron (2006) explains this phenomenon by introducing the concepts of identity and performativity defined by Judith Butler that people constitute their identity by performing gender. In other words, feminine and masculine are not what we are, nor traits we have, but effects we produce by way of particular things we do (Cameron, 2006, p.420). Hence, what we usually consider as womens way of talking as in womens language or mens way of talking as in robust, competitive, and reporting than rapporting, are only performative models of masculine and feminine styles of speech. It can be then said that depending on contexts and situations, people choose to

POLITE REQUESTS, GENDER, ETHNICITY AND AGE perform gender differently, at times behaving in ways that are normally considered as the other gender. (Cameron, 2006, p.421). As far as the relationship between gender and politeness is concerned, Mills (2005) claims that the notion of women being nicer than men must be challenged. She emphasizes that how we acknowledge behaviors as polite or impolite is based on the stereotypes of what is perceived to be gender-appropriate behavior (p.276). That is, stereotypically, it is said that women are more indirect in requests, sympathetic, caring, and cooperative, where as men

are more direct, interruptive and competitive, and it is judged impolite whenever women act in a masculine way. This may be applied to the situation at a caf when a male customer orders a drink more directly as A coffee, please may be judged as not impolite but if it were a female customer judged as impolite, which attributes to the stereotypical perspectives held by the society as a whole for gender-appropriate behaviors. Such stereotypes may be the reason behind the distinct ways of ordering a drink depending on gender. Speech Acts between Customers and Employees The studies carried out on politeness and gender hint at the different manners in which customers make orders at a caf to employees. Some make a polite request with interrogatives such as May I have~, or Can I have~, while some others use declaratives such as Ill have~, I would like~. Some very few even use imperatives such as just giving the name of the drink or food that they want. My aim of this study is to see if what accounts for such differences in manners of polite requests attribute to the difference in gender and ethnical background, that is, largely speaking, whether a customer has an Asian background or Caucasian background. Pinto (2011) shed a light on how politeness at a service encounter is judged differently depending on cultures as he notes that speakers from Anglo cultures in general, have the risk of being considered as superficial or insincere because there is the abundance of niceties

POLITE REQUESTS, GENDER, ETHNICITY AND AGE employed in English [which] could be interpreted as insincere in that it suggests a level of sentiment or emotional involvement that might appear excessive, at least from an outsiders perspective (p. 216) that value directness versus indirectness as Americans do. My study will thus investigate if face-work is implemented differently in the polite requests of the customers based on the differing ethnic background. Research Question

Based on the previous studies, and my personal experiences, I was curious to know if women and men actually express politeness in a different manner on a daily basis at a casual service encounter as a caf performing their distinct gender roles. Also, if having an Asian or Caucasian background generates distinct patterns of polite requests influenced by the different norms for dealing with FTAs. In addition to these, I was also interested if the commonly said social phenomenon regarding politeness with young people that they are becoming less polite in public compared to the past can be proved by this research. Initially, I did not include age as an independent variable, but as a matter of fact, the results showed the opposite trend, and as I analyzed the data, I found the variable as significant as the other two variables. Hence, I formed this studys research question as the following: In what ways does the frequency of polite requests by customers to clerks vary with gender, ethnicity and age? Method This study was conducted in a caf called Plumes located at the center of downtown Monterey, California. I chose this site as there was a good diversity of customers in terms of gender, ethnicity, and age, and the employees there includes both male and female Asian and Caucasian. The site was also very favorable as the background music was not too loud to hear the speech acts that occurred around the cashier. I was able to make sure that I clearly heard what employees and customers said by sitting right by the cashier as a customer, remaining as a non-participant observer throughout the observation.

POLITE REQUESTS, GENDER, ETHNICITY AND AGE Participants

I collected 38 tokens on individual customers, 12 of which were female, and 26 male. As my research focus was on the customers side, my count on tokens is based on the number of customers, and the utterances of employees were recorded together for each token if there were any. Invariably, there was one of the three employees, all of whom seemed to be in their 20s, one female Asian, one male Asian, and one male Caucasian. The customers ranged from early 20s to above 60s, the majority of whom seemed to be in their 20s ~30s. In terms of ethnicity, about three fourth of the customers were Caucasians, and I was only able to collect 10 tokens on customers who seemed to have Asian backgrounds including East Asian, and Southeast Asian. The ratio of gender was a little unbalanced as well: 26 males and 12 females. I did not select customers to observe, but took notes on whoever that came during the few hours of time that I spent at the site each time. Materials and Procedures With my initial research question focusing on the frequency of polite requests by customers to employees depending on their gender and ethnicity, my independent variables that I recorded during observation were gender, male or female and ethnicity, Asian or Caucasian. In addition to the two variables, I recorded their age consisting of three levels, 20s~30s, 40s~50s, and 60s above, as well as time of day in case they had significant influence to the speech event that I was observing. All the variables were recorded on both employees and customers sides. My dependent variable was manner of request whose variants were (a) polite greeting with request, (b) polite direct request with no greeting, and (c) impolite order (no request and no greeting). One token constituted of one adjacency pair between a customer and an employee. Whenever an employee did not say anything, I only included the utterances of customers. Thus, some tokens only constitute one utterance, which a customer produced. The variant (a), polite greeting with requests (p.greeting) included utterances as Hi, how are

POLITE REQUESTS, GENDER, ETHNICITY AND AGE you? Can I have, whose requests with modals as can or would with an interrogative greeting initiated by a customer. I did not count as a p.greeting when an interrogative greeting was initiated by an employee first, and a customer only responded to the greeting not returning the same interrogative greeting. The variant (b), polite direct requests (p.direct) included utterances as Can I have or I would like to have, which are the variant (a) without the interrogative greetings. The variant (c), impolite order (impolite) included utterances as Ill just have, Just, etc, which did not include any greeting nor requests with modals. I only counted as a token when a customer greeted with, for example, how are you, etc. I ranked the variants in the order of politeness as (a) positive greeting, (b) polite direct requests, and then (c) impolite order as marking the least politeness. This was done based on the study conducted by Pinto (2011) whose findings indicated that in the U.S., it is considered more polite when employees came to assist customers with a greeting first as it calls for a rapport. As Pinto (2011) mentions in his study, even within the confines of a highly routine

service encounter, many of the informants seem to appreciate attempts by the cashier to engage in polite verbal interaction, the type of socially appropriate linguistic behavior (p. 231). Hence, part of my aim in this research is to see how this ranking based on the U.S. culture yields distinct results depending on two different ethnicities: Asian or Caucasian.

Results The chart below shows the breakdown list of the 38 tokens I collected defined by the two independent variables, gender and ethnicity, which I included in my initial research question, and age, which I found significant to the frequency in polite requests later.

POLITE REQUESTS, GENDER, ETHNICITY AND AGE

Tokens (38) Gender Female: 12 Male: 26 Ethnicity Caucasian: 27 Asian: 10 Age 20s~30s: 28 40s~50s: 7 60s~: 3

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The 38 tokens are customer base, and I decided not to analyze the variables on the employees in this research as they did not seem to have a significant effect on the manner of polite requests produced by the 38 customers. Also, neither the time of day resulted to have a critical influence on the politeness of the customers, and thus I excluded it from the analysis as well. Gender Differences Figure 1 compares females and males in their use of polite requests. For female, the majority used positive direct requests, very few used positive greeting requests, and less than 20% of them used impolite requests. For male, the numbers were slightly more balanced than female but still most people used positive direct requests, and nearly 30% of them used impolite request forms while close to 20% used positive greeting requests. I expected women to utter more positive greeting requests as they perform to build rapport with interlocutors more than men. However, it seems that some of the conditions of this site did not extract a typical womens language from the females. For both impolite and positive greeting requests, men used them slightly more frequently, but as the number of tokens for male is more than twice as large as those for female, I interpret the data as revealing that there is not so much difference in the frequency of polite requests between the two genders.

POLITE REQUESTS, GENDER, ETHNICITY AND AGE

Figure 1: Manner of polite requests defined by gender

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Female Impolite Positive Direct Positive Greeting Male

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

To investigate further on the trend that both gender presented high frequency in positive direct requests, I examined the age of the speakers who uttered the form. It turned out that for female, 100% of them were in 20s~30s age group, and for male, 87% of them were in 20s~30s age group. For the other two types of requests, the speakers were mainly in their 40s~50s, and above 60s groups. This illustrates that the demographics of my tokens in terms of age being that 74% of the customers were in the 20s~30s group attributed to the high frequency of positive direct requests in my data. The analysis on the reason why this particular group chose to use positive direct requests will be discussed later. Ethnicity Differences Figure 2.1 compares use of polite requests defined by ethnicity. Surprisingly, none of the ten customers with Asian background used impolite requests, and the majority used positive direct requests. Only one person used positive greeting request. On the other hand, nearly 40% of the customers with Caucasian background used impolite requests, half of them used positive direct requests, and close to 20% used positive greeting requests. The findings were as I expected in that Asian background customers did not use impolite forms at all, and very few produced positive greeting forms due to the conventionalized understanding that

POLITE REQUESTS, GENDER, ETHNICITY AND AGE

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Asian cultures tend to put emphasis on expressing politeness, and yet positive greeting distracts negative face too much. However, to my surprise, there was higher number of people with Caucasian background than I expected that produced impolite requests. The results must be analyzed in consideration with other variables as age, which I will come back later.
Figure 2.1: Manner of polite requests defined by ethnicity

Asian Impolite Positive Direct Positive Greeting Caucasian

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

As both ethnicities resulted in producing positive direct requests the most, I decided to do a further analysis only among those who requested with positive directs. There were clearly two types of positive direct request forms: one starting with a short greeting such as Hi and the other without it directly starting with a request such as Can I have~. Figure 2.2 demonstrates the demographics between customers with Asian background and Caucasian background who used positive direct requests based on whether they uttered a short greeting before making a request or not. Very interestingly, close to 80% of the Asian background customers uttered a short greeting before they made a polite request while the data shows that it was only about less than a half of the participants among the Caucasian background customers who uttered a short greeting before making a positive direct request.

POLITE REQUESTS, GENDER, ETHNICITY AND AGE

Figure 2.2: +/- "Hi" among "Positive Direct"s

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(-)"Hi"

Asian Caucasian (+)"Hi"

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

Age Differences In addition to gender and ethnicity, I also analyzed frequency counts of polite requests based on age, which is illustrated with Figure 3 below. Surprisingly, three customers, who seemed to be in the age of above 60s all requested an order with impolite forms, two of which only told an employee the name of the drink or food that they wanted, and one added please at the end. Also with those in their 40s~50s, the most frequently used form, 60% of them, was impolite, nearly 30% positive direct and 10% positive greeting. For the youngest group of customers, the majority used positive direct requests, around 20% of them used positive greeting, and very few used impolite. The results struck me as I expected younger age group to yield impolite requests more frequently than the aged groups as it is often said as being the trend in society. It seems that there is an influence of interlocutors that that customers were talking to, who were employees also in their 20s~30s. I did not see any pattern between the ethnicity of the employees and the type of request customers uttered, but certainly, the same age group of the all three employees had influenced the young age group customers to build a rapport with them and avoid any face threatening acts, while for the older age group of

POLITE REQUESTS, GENDER, ETHNICITY AND AGE customers, using impolite requests did not turn out as a FTA as they were older than the employees.
Figure 3: Manner of polite requests defined by age

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60s~

40s~50s

Impolite Positive Direct Positive Greeting

20s~30s

0%

50%

100%

150%

Discussion From the results, I found some interesting trends on the frequency of polite requests defined by each variable. The first one is that gender does not have a strong correlation with the frequency in the type of polite requests. Despite the fact that male customers uttered more of positive greeting requests and impolite requests, it is very slightly, and what needs to be noted more here is that for both gender, the majority used positive direct forms, and most of them were in 20s~30s age group. As Holmes (1995) maintains that men tend to value public, referentially orientated talk, while women value and enjoy intimate, affectively orientated talk (p. 37), I expected more women to use positive greeting requests, but as a matter of fact, the majority of women in 20s~30s age group used positive direct, and only one woman in 20s~30s age group used a positive greeting. This supports Cameron (2006)s assertion that the particular type of speech inclined to be seen in women as Holmes (1995) claims is only a performative model of feminine styles of speech.

POLITE REQUESTS, GENDER, ETHNICITY AND AGE

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Another significant trend is that age as a variable showed a significant difference in the type of polite requests used by the customers. With all the interlocutors consisting of 20s~30s age group, and the majority of customers also consisting of 20s~30s age group, it seemed that there was an act of convergence claimed by the theory of Communication Accommodation Theory by Giles (2009). CAT explains a human behavior of trying to adjust ones communication in order to either diminish or develop social and communicative differences between oneself and an interlocutor. Then, convergence happens when interactants communication styles become more similar to another, perhaps in terms of choice of slang, obscenities, grammatical structures, volume, pitch, hand movements, and so on (Giles, 2009, p. 279). In this research, it needs to be noted that not only for the customers, but also for the employees, it was very occasional that they initiated a positive greeting. In this respect, there is a high possibility that customers accommodated themselves to their speech act, and did not produce positive greeting requests but only positive direct requests. What needs to be explained next is the low use of impolite forms by the 20s~30s age group. While the two groups above 40s had a high frequency in the utterance of impolite forms, very few of the young aged group used impolite forms. I analyze this phenomenon that the young age group of customers tried to have a positive face towards the same aged employees. Finally, a variable of ethnicity produced an interesting trend that the majority of Asian background customers used positive direct requests while Caucasian background customers yielded a more balanced frequency for all three variants. What needs to be discussed here now is the concept of politeness. As I noted earlier, Pinto (2011) made it clear that for Americans, it is more polite when an utterance is preceded with a greeting even if the greeting is a routine behavior of employees at a service encounter. Thus, it makes sense that higher frequency in positive greeting request was seen with Caucasian background customers. However, with Asians cultures, as Conlan (2005)s work indicated, Asian speakers tended to make a request

POLITE REQUESTS, GENDER, ETHNICITY AND AGE directly, whereas White speakers tended to include some more layers of conversation before

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they made a final request mitigating the force of the face threatening act. In fact, in many parts of Asia, it is too face threatening to greet a stranger with how are you as there is more social distance when encountering strangers in their cultures. As Leech (2007) explains, just as cultures differ in standards as to the appropriate amount of interpersonal space (), politeness accords psychological space, and here also cultures possess differential norms. Some cultures, all other things being equal, are high social distance and thus high politeness cultures. () In cultures with high social distance norms, interaction is laced with high amounts of negative politeness, for these tactics create and invoke social distance. Japanese and other Asian cultures epitomize high social distance interaction norms (p. 528). Despite this negative politeness that Asian background customers expressed with using positive direct requests, what is interesting is that close to 80% of them uttered a short greeting such as Hi to before saying the positive direct requests when only half of the Caucasian background uttered a short greeting. I analyzed this phenomenon that this short greeting Hi was a face-saving speech act to remain in good face for Asian background customers within the interaction with the employees. Maintaining good face assumes a high value in Asian cultures, according to Morand (1996, p. 58). In sum, frequency of polite requests in three variants varied significantly by the two different groups of ethnicities due to the distinct norms of politeness and face threatening acts, which attribute to the varied fundamental cultural values. The research had some limitations in terms of the size of the participants, and an unbalanced ratio of variables; a considerably low number of women, Asian background, and above 40s age groups in the tokens must be addressed to achieve generalizability of the results. In addition, it would be interesting to increase the number of tokens, and analyze the

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correlations of the employees utterances or characteristics with those of customers by making sure that I observed equal length of time on each employee. As I was not able to figure out the shifts of the employees this time, my observation day and time seemed to always overlap the shift of a particular employee. Also, it would be interesting to conduct this research at multiple sites, and include location as a variable. The single site I chose, Plumes, seemed to have many customers who came to the place regularly, and knew the employees well, which was a potential threat to the internal validity of the research. By having multiple sites, and increase in the number of tokens, such a threat should be mitigated. Conclusion When customers come to a caf and place an order, frequency of polite requests did not vary with gender so much, but significantly with ethnicity and age. The socially understood gender role in language was not presented in the speech events at Plumes, and instead illustrated some significant acts from CAT. The majority of the customers, who were in their 20s~30s, converged with the employees who also seemed to be around the same age by using positive direct requests showing their positive face towards them. Another interesting finding was that the majority of the Asian background customers used positive direct requests, no impolite requests and very few positive greeting requests. The fact that negative politeness is highly valued in interactions in Asian cultures led to yield a high frequency of positive direct requests, and very low frequency in the positive greeting requests. Despite this negative politeness expressed with positive direct requests, their major use of a short greeting, Hi, expressed their importance of maintaining good face in interactions. Nevertheless, the study was very limited in the number of tokens and the unbalanced demographics in terms of all the variables, gender, ethnicity and age. With these limitations addressed, it would be interesting and yield more accurate results to investigate on the speech acts of both sides of the interlocutors, and select several sites ensuring that there is a good diversity in the participants.

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References

Brown, P., & Levinson, S.C. (2006). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. In A. Jaworski & N. Coupland (Eds.), The discourse reader (2nd ed, pp. 311-323). London: Routledge. Cameron, D. (2006). Performing gender identity: Young mens talk and the construction of heterosexual masculinity. In A. Jaworski & N. Coupland (Eds.), The discourse reader (2nd ed, pp. 419-432). London: Routledge. Conlan, C. J. (2005). Face threatening acts, primary face threatening acts, and the management of discourse. In Lakoff, R.T. & Ide, S., Broadening the horizon of linguistic politeness. (pp. 129-143). Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company Giles, H. (2009). The process of communication accommodation. In N. Coupland & A. Jaworski (Eds.), The new sociolinguistics reader (pp. 276-286). Houndsmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Goffman, E. (2006). On face-work; An analysis of ritual elements in social interaction. In A. Jaworski & N. Coupland (Eds.), The discourse reader (2nd ed, pp. 299-310). London: Routledge. Holmes, J. (1995). Women, men and politeness. Harlow, England: Longman Group Limited Lakoff, R. (1998). Extract from language and womans place. In Cameron, D., The feminist critique of language. (pp. 242-252). New York, NY: Routledge. Leech, G. (2007). Politeness: Is there an East-West divide?. Journal of Politeness Research. Language, Behaviour, Culture, 3, 167-206. Morand, D. A. (1996). Politeness as a universal variable in corsscultural managerial communication. International Journal of Organizational Analysis, 4, 52-74. Mills, S. (2005). Gender and impoliteness. Journal of Politeness Research. Language, Behaviour, Culture, 1, 263-280. OBarr, W., & Atkins, B. K. (2009). Womens language or powerless language? In N. Coupland & A. Jaworski (Eds.), The new sociolinguistics reader (pp. 159-167). Houndsmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Pinto, D. (2011). Are Americans insincere? Interactional style and politeness in everyday America. Journal of Politeness Research. Language, Behaviour, Culture, 7, 215-238.