Requestive Hints in Japanese and English : Carol Rinnert A, and Hiroe Kobayashi B

ELSEVIER Journal of Pragmatics 31 (1999) 1173-1201
www.elsevier.nl/locate/pragma
Requestive hints in Japanese and English *

Carol Rinnert a,* and Hiroe Kobayashi b
a Faculty of International Studies, Hiroshima City University, 151-50zuka,
Numata-cho, Hiroshima, 731-3194 Japan
h Faculty of Integrated Arts and Sciences, Hiroshima University,
Higashi-Hiro-Shima 739-8521, Japan
Received 13 August 1998; revised version 21 December 1998
Abstract
The analysis of elicited questionnaire judgments and naturally occurring data on Japanese
and English requests revealed an apparent contradiction between the perception of decon-
textualized hints (except for the very formal Japanese hint) as relatively impolite and the
high frequency of actual use of hints in a university office setting. Further analysis of
requestive hints using Weizman's (1989) categories showed that Japanese hints are generally
more opaque than English hints. These findings suggest that Blum-Kulka's (1987) notion of
politeness as a balance between pragmatic clarity and avoiding coerciveness is affected by
contextual (i.e., standard vs. non-standard situations) and cultural variables. At the same
time, the results also point to the need to determine how 'off-record' requestive hints may
differ from 'on-record' hint-like request formulations (Brown and Levinson, 1987). In addi-
tion, the finding that the use of requestive hint formulations apparently serves to build soli-
darity in a standard situation in different ways in the two cultures suggests that the idea of
simultaneously achieving less coerciveness and less distance by means of the same strategy
should be further explored cross-culturally. © 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights
reserved.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1996 AILA I lth World Congress of Applied
Linguistics in Jyv~iskyl~i,Finland (August). The authors wish to thank Jenny Thomas, the discussant, for
her valuable comments and encouragement and Richard C. Parker for creating the graphics for our study.
In addition, we want to express our gratitude to all the participants in this study for their willingness to
contribute to this research; without their help, the study would not have been possible. Special thanks is
due to faculty and staff members at Hiroshima University in Hiroshima, Japan, and Delta College in
Stockton, California, USA, for, allowing us to observe and record their daily interactions; individuals'
names have been changed to preserve anonymity. Our appreciation is also due to a number of people for
their helpful suggestions to improve the clarity and quality of this paper: Sosei Aniya, Nobuyuki Aoki,
Chiaki Iwai, Megumi Ohishi, Chris Schreiner, Peter Skaer and two anonymous reviewers.
* Corresponding author. E-mail: rinnert@intl.hiroshima-cu.ac.jp
0378-2166/99/$ - see front matter © 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
PII: S0378-2166(99)00027-2
1174 C. Rinnert and H. Kobayashi / Journal of Pragmatics 31 (1999) 1173-1201
Keywords: Requests; Hints; Japanese; English; Indirectness; Politeness
1. Introduction
The notions of indirectness and politeness have generated much discussion among
linguists and pragmaticians (e.g., Brown and Levinson, 1987; Fraser, 1978; Lakoff,
1973; Leech, 1983; Searle, 1975). Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) made a strong
connection between the two, arguing that a higher degree of indirectness shows more
politeness. That is, the more the speaker risks loss of face in performing an act such as
a request, the more indirect the strategy he or she uses to be polite. In their model,
politeness means to minimize the threat of face loss incurred by performing the act, and
indirectness is a strategy used to achieve the goal. According to their ranking of possi-
ble strategies for achieving this goal, 'bald on record' (using no mitigating politeness
strategies) is most direct and least polite; 'positive politeness' (addressing the hearer's
need to be valued as a group member) comes next; 'negative politeness' (attending to
the speaker's need to be free from imposition by others) is more indirect and polite;
'off record' (avoiding unequivocal formulation of a face-threatening act through use
of hints) is even more indirect and polite; and 'opting out' (saying nothing) repre-
sents the ultimate in both indirectness and politeness. Thus, hints are assumed to
constitute the most polite strategy among the 4 verbalized strategies (1978: 74).
Leech (1983) maintained the same parallel relation between indirectness and
politeness, offering two rationales: (1) indirectness increases the degree of optional-
ity, and (2) when an illocution (speech act) is more indirect, its force tends to be
diminished and more tentative (1983:108)2
The correlative relation between the two notions, however, has been seriously
questioned (e.g., Blum-Kulka, 1983, 1987; Waiters, 1979). Blum-Kulka (1987)
examined the relation and found that politeness and indirectness were perceived dif-
ferently by raters: Whereas native speakers of both English and Hebrew rated con-
ventionally indirect requests as most polite, they judged hints as most indirect, but
less polite. That is, conventional requests like 'Could you ... ?', 'Would you mind
... ?' and 'Why don't you ... ?' received higher politeness ratings than non-conven-
tionally indirect requests (statements of 'grounders', i.e. reasons for the implied
request). 2 She argued that "the pragmatic clarity of the message is an essential part
of politeness" (1987: 131) and therefore a lack of pragmatic clarity could explain
the lower ratings of politeness for hints. She further postulated that politeness is
Although Leech (1983) illustrated this relation mostly through examples of 'bald on record' and
'negative politeness' in Brown and Levinson's (1978) terms, his argument can be extended to 'off
record' indirectness (hints).
2 Following Blum-Kulka's definitions (1989), 'conventional indirectness' involves (1) convention of
both 'means' (semantic device) and 'form' (specific wording); (2) pragmatic 'duality' in terms of its
specific 'literal' vs. 'conventional' interpretations; and (3) potential 'negotiability' of the pragmatic
force; on the other hand, 'non-conventionalindirectness' involves (1) less clear conventionof means or
form; and (2) pragmatic 'vagueness' (as opposed to the 'ambiguity' or 'duality' based on clear specific
alternatives in interpretationfor conventional indirectness).
C. Rinnert and H. Kobayashi / Journal of Pragmatics 31 (1999) 1173-1201 1175
based on the interactional balance between two needs, one for pragmatic clarity and
the other to avoid coerciveness.
Brown and Levinson's account of politeness has also been questioned from non-
Western perspectives (Gu, 1990; Hill et al., 1986; Ide, 1989; Mao, 1994; Mat-
sumoto, 1988, 1989; Nwoye, 1992). Matsumoto (1988, 1989) and Ide (1989), for
example, argued against its universality from the viewpoint of Japanese politeness.
In Japanese, honorifics carry social information, and the choice of appropriate lexi-
cal/grammatical form according to social context (i.e., situation, participants' social
status and relationship) is essential. That is, there is no 'neutral' form that can be
used without marking the speaker's relationship to the hearer. Thus, for Japanese
speakers, politeness means to perceive one's position in relation to others and choose
the proper formality level of speech according to social conventions. Hill et al.
(1986) distinguish between two types of politeness, discernment and volition.
Whereas discernment (wakimae) regards politeness as social indexing, volition deals
with goals a speaker intends to achieve. Japanese polite linguistic expressions,
according to them, tend to reflect more discernment politeness, as opposed to Eng-
lish polite expressions, which reveal more use of volitional politeness.
The arguments of Matsumoto, Ide and Hill et al. (like those of Fraser, 1978, 1990)
add the importance of social interaction to the definition of politeness. At the same
time, their findings imply that indirectness may be superseded by formal aspects of
language in terms of their effects on politeness, due to the prominent role of such
aspects in Japanese. However, this issue requires further exploration and clarifica-
tion, which provided one major impetus for this study.
2. Background of the study
The overall purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between indirect-
ness and politeness through the analysis of perceptions and actual uses of requestive
hints (non-conventionally indirect requests) by L1 (first language) speakers of Japan-
ese and English. More specifically, we first aim to compare perceived politeness of
requestive hints in relation to other request forms (direct and conventionally indi-
rect). In this attempt, we examine how the two factors of formality level and seman-
tic content affect the perceived politeness of request forms in Japanese and English.
As discussed above, Japanese polite expressions for requests appear to be strongly
linked to form, while at the same time they can express a variety of specific seman-
tic contents (e.g., 'willingness', 'possibility', 'desire') that represent conventionally
indirect requests (Kumatoridani, 1995). On the other hand, studies of English
requests suggest that politeness level is affected by deference markers including use
of past tense and such 'mitigating' phrases as please and possibly (Fraser, 1978;
Kitao, 1990; Tanaka and Kawade, 1982), while conventionally indirect requests are
realized through semantic devices similar to those in Japanese (Blum-Kulka and
House, 1989; Searle, 1975).
Our second specific aim is to investigate the actual use of requestive hints in a
similar institutional setting across the two languages. Cross-cultural studies on
1176 c. Rinnert and H. Kobayashi / Journal of Pragmatics 31 (1999) 1173-1201
requestive behavior based mainly on discourse completion test (DCT) questionnaire

data in a variety of languages (e.g., Blum-Kulka and House, 1989; Weizman, 1993)
have found that L1 speakers' use of hints is 'remarkably low' (Weizman, 1993: 126)
relative to either direct strategies or conventionally indirect ones. However, this find-
ing requires further investigation for two reasons. First, studies of particular cultural
groups (e.g., House and Kasper, 1981; Rose and Ono, 1995) have shown that other
sources of data, including role plays and multiple choice questionnaires, reveal more
frequent occurrences of hints than have been produced on DCTs. Second, even if it
turns out to be true that the actual incidence of naturally occurring requestive hints
in non-Asian languages (i.e., English, French, German and Hebrew) is low, it is an
open empirical question whether a similar trend holds true for a language like Japan-
ese that is known for the frequent use of indirect speech as part of its distinctive
communicative style (Clancy, 1986; Condon, 1985; Nakane, 1974; Ueda, 1974).
3. Perceived politeness of requestive hints
3.1. Questionnaire data
To address the first aim of investigating perceived politeness of hints in relation to

other request forms, questionnaires were constructed for each of the two languages.
Based on previous studies of perceived politeness (e.g., Carrell and Konneker, 1983;
Fraser, 1978; Hill et al., 1986; Kitao, 1990; Tanaka and Kawade, 1982), a variety of
request forms representing a range of politeness judgments was selected and compa-
rable hints were devised. 3
Each questionnaire included 10 English requests varying in terms of formality lev-
els and degrees of directness: 2 direct, 6 conventionally indirect, and 2 non-conven-
tionally indirect (hints). As shown in Table 1, the English requests represented 2 for-
mality levels ('less formal' and 'more formal') of direct requests and hints, and of 3
semantic devices of conventional indirectness: 'ability', 'willingness', and 'desire'.
The first 2 of these semantic devices, usually referred to as 'query preparatory'
(Searle, 1975), are observed to occur frequently as request strategies (Blum-Kulka,
1987). The semantic device 'desire' is also included under conventionally indirect
requests because it "by social convention ... count[s] as [a] potential request"
(Blum-Kulka, 1987: 134) and because the researchers wished to compare percep-
tions of this semantic device in Japanese and English. The 2 hints questioned the fea-
sibility of making the request by checking a pre-condition for granting the request
(i.e., whether the hearer was still using the book), without actually stating the
request. For each pair of indirect requests in English, the 'more formal' variant was
in the past tense, and all 5 'more formal' requests contained other markers of defer-
3 AlthoughBrown and Levinson(1987: 19) point out the relativelygreater potential weaknesses of
experimentaldesignsthatelicit politenessjudgmentsof hints as opposedto more conventionalrequests,
we believethat suchdata can provideone moreperspectiveon the relationbetweenhints and otherkinds
of requests.
c. Rinnert and H. Kobayashi / Journal of Pragmatics 31 (1999) 1173-1201 1177
ence, mitigation or formality besides past tense (Carrell and Konneker, 1983; Fraser,
1978; Kitao, 1990; Tanaka and Kawade, 1982). Thus, the formal direct request con-
tained please; formal conventionally indirect 'ability' was mitigated with I was won-
dering i f . . . ; 'desire' contained the lexical substitution of the more polite would like
for want; 'willingness' was softened by use of the mitigating or deferential Would
you mind ... ; and the formal hint contained a mitigating yet and a more formal lex-
ical item finished in place of the colloquial through.
Table 1
English requests on questionnaire
Direct
Show me the book. (less formal)
Please show me the book. (more formal)
Conventionallyindirect
'Ability'
Could you show me the book? (less formal)
I was wonderingif you could show me the book. (more formal)
'Desire'
I want you to show me the book. (less formal)
I would like you to show me the book. (more formal)
'Willingness'
Will you show me the book? (less formal)
Would you mind showingme the book? (more formal)
Non-conventionallyindirect
Are you throughwith the book? (less formal)
Were you finishedwith the book yet? (more formal)
The Japanese requests on the questionnaire consisted of 7 relatively frequent

request forms from the Hill et al. (1986) study that were comparable to 7 of the Eng-
lish requests, in addition to 2 hints of different formality levels and 1 more conven-
tionally indirect request to make the lists in the two languages approximately func-
tionally equivalent (see Takahashi, 1996, for discussion and examples of
functionally equivalent, as opposed to conventionally equivalent, requests in Japan-
ese and English). The 10 Japanese request forms represented 3 different formality
levels ('informal', 'formal' and 'very formal') of 2 semantic devices of conventional
indirectness: 'desire' and 'willingness', in addition to 2 formality levels for direct
requests ('informal' and 'formal') and hints ('informal' and 'very formal'). In Japan-
ese, 3 distinct formality levels, which generally correspond to levels of politeness,
have traditionally been identified based on lexical/grammatical form (Niyakawa,
1991; Matsumoto, 1989): (1) the verb-ending (or copula) form da is plain, 'infor-
mal', (2) the form desu/masu is polite, 'formal', and (3) gozaimasu is most polite,
'very formal'. In addition, the use of honorifics increases the level of formality,
which consequently raises the level of politeness. The following 3 pairs of examples,
with English glosses, illustrate how the honorific expression itadaku in (1) and (2)
increases the level from 'formal' to 'very formal', and o and nari- in (3) increase the
level from 'informal' to 'very formal':
(1) Sono hon misete kuremasen ka ? --4 Sono hon misete itadakemasen ka ?
(the book show receive-not Q?) ~ (the book show humble-receive-potentially-
not Q?)
Wouldn't you show me the book? --9 Couldn't I receive the favor of your show-
ing me the book?
(2) Sono hon misete hoshiin desukedo. --->Sono hon misete itadakitain desukedo.
(the book show desire be but) --9 (the book show humble-receive-desire be but)
I would like you to show me the book (if possible). --4 I would like to receive
the favor of your showing me the book (if possible).
(3) Sono hon mou sunda ? --4 Sono hon mou o-sumini narimashita ka ?
(the book yet done?) ~ (the book yet honorific-finish-to honorific-came Q?)
Are you through (with) the book yet? --9 Were you (possibly) to the point of hav-
ing finished (with) the book yet?
Japanese requests on the questionnaire included 2 semantic devices of conven-

tional indirectness: 'desire' and 'willingness'. 4 Although utterances concerning the
hearer's ability could be taken as requests in Japanese (Kumatoridani, 1995), they
are not widely used and thus not included in most lists of common request forms
(e.g., Hill et al., 1986). For this reason, the semantic device of 'ability' in Japanese
was excluded from our study. The 10 Japanese request forms are shown in Table 2.
It should be noted that very formal direct request forms rarely occur in Japanese,
except in writing; thus, in order to keep the number of requests to 10, the same as in
English, no very formal direct request or formal hint was included.
3.2. Data collection
For both Japanese and English, the 10 request forms were listed in the same ran-
dom order (shown in Appendix 1) and subjects were asked to rate each of the
requests on a scale of 1 to 7 (low to high) in terms of its level of politeness in most
situations. As shown by previous studies dealing with the situational specificity of
perceived politeness (e.g., Blum-Kulka, 1987), this kind of decontextualized judg-
ment task clearly has limitations. These ratings of relative politeness of request
forms were intended to tap 'linguistic rules of politeness' as in the first section of
Hill et al.'s (1986: 354) study, as opposed to 'social rules of politeness' that depend
upon situational factors as in a later section of that study. As a first attempt to
address such situational factors in questionnaire data for this study, a supplementary
study elicited examples of possible addressees for each of the 10 request forms
from a subset of 30 Japanese respondents (see section 3.5 for discussion of the
results).
4 The label 'willingness' was used to conform with the English label, but another label, such as 'pos-
sibility', could equally well be used for the semantic device underlyingthis set of request forms. In fact,
the potential verb form of itadakemasen, the very formal member of this set, represents a morphological
coding of 'possibility', and all three requests question whether the speaker will receive the act of being
shown the book by the hearer.
Table 2
Japanese requests on questionnaire
Direct
Sono hon misete.* (informal)
Show me the book.
Sono hon misete kudasai. (formal)
Please show me the book.
Conventionally indirect
'Desire'
Sono hon misete hoshiin dakedo. (informal)
I want you to show me the book (if possible).
Sono hon misete hoshiin desukedo. (formal)
I would like you to show me the book (if possible).
Sono hon misete itadakitaiin desukedo. (very formal)
I would like to receive the favor of your showing me the book (if possible).
'Willingness'
Sono hon misete kureru?** (informal)
Will you show me the book?
Sono hon misete kuremasen ka? (formal)
Wouldn't you show me the book?
Sono hon misete itadakemasen ka ? (very formal)
Couldn't I receive the favor of your showing me the book?
Non-conventionally indirect
Sono hon mou sunda? (informal)
Are you through (with) the book yet?
Sono hon mou o-sumini narimashita ka ? (very formal)
Were you (possibly) to the point of having finished (with) the book yet?
* The object particle o is omitted in all the requests to represent conversational Japanese.
** Informal questions without the ka particle are characterized by rising intonation.
The subjects were students, teachers and university-related staff, that is, represen-
tatives o f the same groups that produced most of the naturally occurring data in the
second section of the study. The 145 Japanese subjects included 92 university stu-
dents, 14 teachers, and 39 university office workers or older students participating in
a w o m e n ' s c o m m u n i t y college course. The 95 native English speaking subjects
included 40 teachers, mainly North Americans, teaching in Japan 5 and 55 university
students in the U.S.
3.3. P e r c e p t i o n s o f p o l i t e n e s s
Table 3 presents m e a n scores o f perceived politeness o f the 10 requests in

Japanese and English, and Figs. 1 and 2 display the results graphically. In Japan-
ese, the scores fell into 3 distinct groups, which predictably corresponded to the 3
5 Approximately one-quarter of the native English teachers had resided in Japan for less than three
years, whereas over half had been in Japan for six or more years.
levels o f formality: ' i n f o r m a l ' , ' f o r m a l ' and ' v e r y formal'. Like direct and con-
ventionally indirect (CI) requests, the perceived politeness o f hints was greatly
affected by formality level. C o m p a r e d with the other requests, the informal hint
was rated lower than the informal CI requests 'willingness' and ' s p e a k e r ' s desire',
and only slightly higher than the direct informal request. In contrast, the very for-
mal hint was rated the m o s t polite o f all the request f o r m s , slightly more polite
than the very formal CI 'willingness' and more polite than the very formal CI
'desire'.
Table 3
Results of politeness ratings by formality and semantic content
Japanese Politeness Mean SD English Politeness Mean SD

rank Score rank score
Very formal More formal

NI feasibility 1 6.52 0.90 CI ability 1 6.00 1.06
CI willingness 2 6.32 0.74 CI willingness 2 5.94 0.98
CI desire 3 5.97 1.14 D imperative 3 5.41 1.21
CI desire 5 4.31 1.34
Formal NI feasibility 7 3.83 1.69
CI willingness 4 4.63 1.08
D imperative 5 4.55 1.16 Less formal
CI desire 6 4.46 1.14 CI ability 4 5.08 1.21
CI willingness 6 4.24 1.15
Informal NI feasibility 8 3.80 1.36
CI willingness 7 2.81 1.08 CI desire 9 2.41 1.02
CI desire 8 2.81 1.20 D imperative 10 1.55 0.91
NI feasibility 9 1.81 0.96
D imperative 10 1.64 0.81
Politeness ranks: 1 = most polite, 10 = least polite

Scores: 1 = not polite, 7 = very polite
D = direct
CI = conventionally indirect
NI = non-conventionally indirect
SD = standard deviation
In English, the perceived politeness o f the 10 requests was also affected by the
2 levels o f relative formality (less formal and m o r e formal), but it appears that the
effects were not as great as in Japanese. More formal and less formal hints were
rated as the 7th and the 8th ranks, respectively, on the politeness scales (mean
scores: 3.83 and 3.80), which were lower than the ratings o f both formal and
informal CI 'ability' and 'willingness' and also than those o f the direct request
with please. On the other hand, both hints were perceived to be m u c h more polite
than informal CI 'desire' ( ' I want you to . . . ' ) and the less formal direct request.
The results suggest that whereas the perceived politeness o f Japanese hints
depended almost entirely upon formality level, English hints did not (see discussion
below).
Politeness
7 I I
CI (willingness)
I NI (fea!ibility)/~
6
I /'S SS CI (desire)
5
2
<,
iDirect
t
I
Informal Formal Very formal
Fig. 1. Perceived politeness by Japanese speakers.

CI = Conventionally indirect requests; NI = Non-conventionally indirect requests
Politeness
7 CI (ability)
CI (willingness)
6
5
~,,"~.. ~ " / ii Direct
~t" Z"~ CI (desire)
4
r- /,,,- - NI (feasibility)
3 f S S
2
I
I
Less formal More formal
Fig. 2. Perceived politeness by English speakers.

CI = Conventionally indirect requests; NI = Non-conventionally indirect requests
3.4. Effects of formality level and semantic content
To examine more precisely the effects of formality level and semantic devices on
perceived politeness of indirect requests, mean politeness scores were computed
within each language on the basis of a 2-way ANOVA with repeated measures. For
Japanese, 2 levels of formality (informal vs. very formal) and 3 semantic devices
(desire, hint, willingness) were used; for comparable English computations, 2 levels
of formality (less formal vs. more formal) and 4 semantic devices (ability, desire,
hint, willingness) were employed. For this analysis, 'hint' was included as a seman-
tic device because the type of hint substrategy employed in this study involved
'questioning feasibility', which is "related semantically to the conventional 'ques-
tioning preparatory conditions' strategy" (Weizman, 1989: 85) by referring partially
to a precondition for the possibility of the requested act (e.g., 'Are you finished with
the book?'). However, it should be noted that because the present study deals with
only one type of hint strategy, the results cannot be extended to other hint types.
The results of the repeated measures A N O V A indicate that the 2 factors of for-
mality level and semantic content significantly affected both groups' perceptions of
the perceived politeness of request forms (formality: F = 1777.45, p < .000, seman-
tic: F = 17.24, p < .000 for Japanese; formality: F = 114.52, p < .000, semantic: F
= 162.74, p < .000 for English ). Multiple comparisons using a Scheff6 test, how-
ever, revealed that whereas there were no significant differences in any of the 3 pairs
of 3 semantic devices compared for Japanese, there were distinctive differences in
all 6 pairs of the 4 devices for English. That is, although semantic content affected
the 2 groups' overall ratings of the perceived politeness of requests, this factor
exerted more salient effects on the English group's perceptions, distinguishing the 4
semantic devices from each other, with 'ability' most polite, 'willingness' next most
polite, 'hint' (feasibility) less polite, and 'desire' least polite. 6
3.5. Discussion
Our findings confirm that Japanese perceptions of linguistic politeness depend

heavily upon the formality level of the utterance, particularly in terms of morpho-
logically encoded honorifics and verb endings (Ide, 1989; Matsumoto, 1988, 1989;
Niyakawa, 1991). The perceptions of politeness of hints, however, appear to be
affected not only by the form itself, but also by the social information it carries, i.e.,
according to the rule of discernment politeness which makes a strong link between
the linguistic form and the speaker's relationship to the hearer (Hill et al., 1986; Ide,
1989). The informal hint, sono hon mou sunda? (Are you through with the book
yet?), was rated as much closer to the informal direct request than the informal con-
ventional indirect requests ('desire' and 'willingness'), due at least in part to the
6 In order to test the possibility that the perceptions of native English teachers living in Japan may have
been influenced by pragmatic transfer from Japanese, the responses of the teachers were compared to
those of the American students residing in the U.S. by applying independent T-tests to the ratings by the
two groups. The results of this comparison suggest that the teachers' judgments of these request forms
had not been influenced by living in Japan. The ratings by the two groups were significantly different for
only 3 of the 10 requests, and in 2 of those 3 cases the direction of the differences was opposite to the
Japanese perceptions. That is, the students' judgments were closer than the teachers' to those of the
Japanese ratings, so it was only for one form ('Please show me the book', students: 5.63, teachers: 5.09,
p = .03) where the teachers' perceptions could possibly have been influenced by having lived in Japan
(mean Japanese rating: 4.63). It should be noted that within the Japanese group a similar significant dif-
ference was found between the students and teachers for 3 of the 10 cases, which suggests that there may
be age-related differences within both groups, an issue requiring further study using more balanced age
representation and more rigorous statistical testing.
plain form da-ending, which evokes a close relationship between speaker and hearer
in the raters' mind. In fact, a supplementary study (described in section 3.2) showed
that for both the informal direct request and the informal hint, most of the 30 respon-
dents chose the same socially and psychologically close people (close friend, brother
or sister) as possible addressees. Because of this similarity, the informal hint with the
da-ending may have become associated with the direct request, although the hint
was not as clear as the direct request in terms of conveying the speaker's intent.
Thus, this association could have overridden the indirectness of the propositional
content and pragmatic force of the whole message.
In contrast, the very formal hint, Sono hon mou o-sumini narimashita ka ? (Were
you [possibly] to the point of having finished with that book?), gained the highest
ratings in terms of perceived politeness because it was marked with the polite hon-
orifics o and nari-, while the feature of indirectness remained intact. The use of such
honorifics is usually associated with people socially higher (e.g., one's senior or pro-
fessor) or psychologically distant, (e.g., stranger), as shown in Hill et al. (1986) and
confirmed by our supplementary study. When the speaker addresses these people
(that is, when the hearer is more dominant), the use of indirectness, particularly
hints, appears to be preferred in Japanese (Beebe and Takahashi, 1989; Rose, 1994;
Rose and Ono, 1995) because it can allow the speaker to avoid coerciveness by leav-
ing the interpretation of the message to the hearer (Brown and Levinson, 1978).
Questioning feasibility, the hint type used for politeness judgments in this study, for
example, can be taken as an information-seeking question, and whether it is recog-
nized as a request or not depends upon the hearer (Weizman, 1989). Giving the
hearer such an option is assumed to be polite in many languages, and this tendency
to leave the interpretation open seems to be strong among Japanese speakers, partic-
ularly in situations where differences in relative status exist between the interlocu-
tors. Thus, whereas the indirectness may be superseded by the low formality level in
the case of the informal hint, both high formality level and indirectness combined
appear to increase the level of perceived politeness in the case of the very formal
hint. Overall, the above findings suggest that Japanese speakers perceive the level of
politeness according to the rules of discernment politeness (wakimae), which is real-
ized through both the choice of linguistic expression and the constraints on when
to speak and what to say. The very formal hint was apparently perceived as carrying
a high level of politeness because of its formality and because requesting a person
in a higher position to do something directly could be considered inappropriate
behavior.
English perceptions of politeness, on the other hand, were not affected as much as
Japanese perceptions by formality level. In fact, they appear to have been affected to
a similar degree overall by formality level and semantic content. Nonetheless, con-
sidering the fact that the ratings of perceived politeness of the informal and formal
hints were nearly identical, the formality level differences exerted hardly any effects
on the perceptions of hints, whereas they did affect the perceptions of conventionally
indirect and direct requests. Although earlier studies (e.g., Kitao, 1990) have indi-
cated that the use of past tense in request sentences could add some degree of polite-
ness, this may not hold true with hints in general or the particular hints investigated
in the present study. In either case, it is conceivable that the effects of the particular
formality markers chosen (past tense, lexical substitution, mitigator) on the ratings of
perceived politeness, without adding other deference markers (such as possibly), are
too small to bring about any changes in the perceptions of politeness. Another pos-
sibility is that no matter how much their formality level is increased by the use of
syntactic or lexical devices, hints may still be perceived as less polite than conven-
tionally indirect requests such as 'ability' or 'willingness' in English, because of
their open-ended propositional content, linguistic form and pragmatic force (Blum-
Kulka, 1987: 141). One way to test this would be to elicit perceptions of a hint with
more mitigating markers, such as '1 was wondering if you were finished with the
book yet'.
As discussed earlier, hints involve the hearer in attempting to recognize the
speaker's intent; however, at the same time the hearer could have difficulty in deci-
phering the intent correctly because the interpretation of the message has to depend
upon contextual knowledge. Thus, even with increased formality, hints would still
carry a lack of pragmatic clarity to the message, which could lead to unsuccessful
communication. However, as explained earlier, Japanese speakers have been
observed to prefer hint strategies when they address a person higher in status, and
the use of hints in such social situations is attributed to politeness. If this is true, it
suggests that the relative importance attached to pragmatic clarity in relation to the
notion of politeness differs cross-culturally and situationally. As Blum-Kulka (1987)
also notes, this could be an important issue for further investigation.
4. Naturally occurring requestive hints
4.1. Ethnographically collected data
To address the second aim of examining naturally occurring requests in an insti-

tutional setting, this study adopted an ethnographic approach, focusing its observa-
tions on one social situation: an administrative office in a university. The Japanese
data was gathered in two offices of a Japanese national university (a Foreign Lan-
guage Department office and a Language Laboratory office) over a period of six
months, and a comparable amount of English data was collected from two offices of
a community college (a Fine and Physical Arts Division office and a Family, Con-
sumer and Health Sciences Division office) in the U.S. Observers tape-recorded and
transcribed requests occurring naturally in university offices in face-to-face interac-
tions among department or division heads, secretaries, teachers, students and service
personnel. Notes were taken on gender, relative status, social distance, difficulty of
the request, response to the request, and contextual information.
4.2. Frequency of hints in relation to other request strategies
The Japanese and English data collected in university offices were first analyzed
in terms of the proportion of hints relative to other request strategies used. Two ana-
lysts identified, 7 segmented and coded all the requests, a total of 78 in Japanese and
67 in English, in terms of degree of directness. Following Blum-Kulka and Olshtain
(1984) and Weizman (1989, 1993), three degrees of directness were differentiated:
(1) direct (e.g., English imperative and Japanese -te + kudasai form), (2) conven-
tionally indirect (e.g., English would you mind and Japanese -itadakemasen ka) and
(3) non-conventionally indirect (hints).
A list of the most common forms, whose formality levels were grouped together
within each category of directness, is presented in Appendix 2. It should be noted
that in contrast to Ervin-Tripp's (1976) study, 'need' statements (e.g., 'I need a pen')
were categorized under 'hints'. As pointed out by Ervin-Tripp, the requestive nature
of a 'need' statement by a person of higher authority to a subordinate is very 'obvi-
ous' in certain contexts. However, not all the instances of 'need' statements in our
data were requests from higher to lower status, and they were all potentially deni-
able, that is, if challenged, the speaker could have responded with something like: 'I
wasn't asking you to get me one, I was just stating a fact (or just thinking out loud)'.
Thus, like Rose (1996), we considered these statements as non-conventionally indi-
rect 'hints', comparable to 'I don't have a pen' or 'I forgot my pen'. Similarly, ellip-
tical statements such as 'kagi' (key) addressed to a secretary who was responsible
for room keys were also coded as hints because it was not easy to determine the form
of the deleted request, which could have been direct, e.g., '... kudasai' (please), con-
ventionally indirect, e.g., ' m a y I have ... ?' or non-conventionally indirect, e.g., 'do
you have ... ?'.
A post-hoc inter-rater reliability test on 20 randomly selected samples of data
from each language showed a correlation of .87 on segmentation and .82 on catego-
rization. During the actual coding, disagreements were resolved through discussion.
Table 4 presents the resulting frequency of occurrence of requests in each of the
three categories of directness in Japanese and English.
As shown in Table 4, among both Japanese and English speakers requestive hints
occurred more frequently than either direct or conventionally indirect requests. In
fact, more than half the requests in this data (58% of Japanese requests and 54% of
English requests) were formulated as hints. On the other hand, the two groups dif-
fered in terms of their frequency of use of the other two directness strategies. Japan-
ese speakers used direct (D) requests more frequently than conventionally indirect
(CI) requests (27% D vs. 15% CI), in contrast to English speakers, who showed the
opposite tendency (9% D vs. 37% CI).
In order to determine whether the relationship between the speaker and hearer
may have affected the choice of request strategy, frequency of each category of
7 Like Bargiela-Chiappini and Harris (1996), we identified requests in our data based on a pragmatic
definition of a request, in our case as a 'directive' counting as a 'legitimate attempt' by a speaker to
induce some action on the part of the hearer that in some way benefits the speaker or the institution;
thus, we excluded pure information questions such as 'Is Professor Smith in her office?' unless they
involved an action on the part of the hearer, such as telephoning Professor Smith or escorting the speaker
to see her. It should be noted that requested actions in our data ranged from job related duties, similar to
Bax's (1986) work orders, to highly personal ones, such as a secretary eating a piece of cake presented
to a teacher in order to save the dieting teacher from temptation.
Table 4
Distribution of request strategies in Japanese and English
Direct CI NI Total
Japanese 21 12 45 78
(27%) (15%) (58%) (100%)
English 6 25 36 67
(9%) (37%) (54%) (100%)
Total 27 27 81 145
(19%) (25%) (56%) (100%)
CI = conventionallyindirect
NI = non-conventionallyindirect (hints)
request was determined for relative status of speaker and hearer on the basis of the
analysts' knowledge of the participants' roles and relationships within each office.
Table 5 shows the frequencies of occurrence in both Japanese and English for the
three possible status relationships: speaker higher than hearer, speaker equal to
hearer, and speaker lower than hearer.
Table 5
Request strategies by speaker-hearer relationships
Japanese English
Direct CI NI Total Direct CI NI Total
S>H 15% 10% 40% 65% S>H 6% 24% 28% 58%

(12) (8) (31) (51) (4) (16) (19) (39)
S=H 4% 1% 1% 6% S=H 1% 10% 9% 21%
(3) (l) (1) (5) (1) (7) (6) (14)
S<H 8% 4% 17% 28% S<H 1% 3% 16% 21%
(6) (3) (13) (22) (1) (2) (11) (14)
Total 27% 15% 58% 100% Total 9% 37% 54% 100%
(21) (12) (45) (78) (6) (25) (36) (67)
S>H: speaker status higher than hearer cI = conventionallyindirect

S=H: speaker and hearer equal status NI = non-conventionallyindirect
S<H: speaker status lower than hearer
As shown in Table 5, the majority of requests in both the Japanese and English
data were made from higher to lower status. This tendency probably reflects the
nature of the activity that occurs in university offices, and any generalizations about
requests from equal to equal and from lower to higher status should be considered
very tentative until more data is collected. Nevertheless, based on the analysis of this
limited data, there did not seem to be great differences in the relative frequencies of
hints by relationship in either language. That is, except for the case of equal status
speaker and hearer in Japanese, which contained too few cases to base any judg-
ments on, the general trends seemed to hold across the three relationships in each
C. Rinnertand H. Kobayashi / Journal of Pragmatics 31 (1999) 1173-1201 1187
language: There were a greater number of hints, fewer direct requests, and fewest
conventionally indirect requests in Japanese, whereas there were a greater number of
hints, fewer conventionally indirect requests (or in the case of status equals, almost
the same number), and the fewest direct requests in English.
4.3. Formality level of request forms in naturally occurring data
Before looking into the use of requestive hints in more depth, we examined all the
request forms in the naturally occurring data in terms of social status and formality
level in order to compare them with the findings from the questionnaire data. To
determine the formality level, we applied the same criteria used in constructing the
questionnaire (see section 3.1). 8 The analyses of 70 Japanese and 64 English request
forms, which excluded 8 and 3 cases from the respective data sources because of
verb ellipsis, showed a general tendency corresponding to that of the questionnaire
data.
For the Japanese data, the request forms used from lower to higher status pre-
dominantly occurred at the formal level (17 out of 18, 94.3%), including desu/masu,
with no informal and only one very formal case. This indicates that when addressing
a higher status person, the Japanese speakers in our study did follow a discernment
type of politeness (wakimae). At the same time, the natural data also show that when
addressing a lower status person, speakers used both the formal and informal forms
(45.6% and 52.2%, respectively, of 46 cases). That is, the higher status speaker
appeared to have more freedom to choose the level of formality on the basis of voli-
tional politeness according to contextual factors involved in particular situations
(i.e., difficulty of the request, perception that it is not part of the hearer's job) and/or
social factors such as gender and age. 9 On the other hand, this frequent use of formal
forms from higher to lower status could also be considered as relating to a broader
view of discernment politeness (wakimae) which is carried out by showing the
acknowledgment of a sense of place both in society and in the situational context. As
people in a higher social position consider their place in society in terms of such fac-
tors as social status, age, role, gender, and situational context, they could choose for-
mal forms as appropriate linguistic expressions to show their concern for demeanor
and the observation of wakimae. However, an interpretation of wakimae that
attempts to explain formal linguistic behavior from higher to lower status as well as
from lower to higher status could be seen as simply reflecting "speakers' adherence
to accepted politeness norms" (Kasper, 1997: 380). As suggested by Kasper (1997)
in her discussion of the controversial nature of claims regarding the issue of discern-
8 It should be noted that external modification(e.g., 'Excuse me.... '), which is an important means of
increasing the level of politeness in both languages (cf. Ide, 1986; Kasper, 1990), was not considered as
part of this investigation.
9 Ide's (1989) and Hill et al.'s (1986) studies provided empirical evidence that Japanese speakers (uni-
versity students in their studies) perceived the level of politeness according to the rule of discernment
(wakimae). However, this rule appears to apply to the form used by a lower status speaker addressing
someone of higher status. Their studies did not show clearly whether a higher status speaker would con-
sistently follow this discernmentrule in addressing someone of lower status.
ment politeness, further investigation is necessary to clarify the concept of discem-

ment politeness (wakimae)and its relation to volitional (strategic) politeness in
Japanese.
The analysis of English request forms in the naturally occurring data shows that
regardless of the status of addressees, the speakers used mostly the less formal level:
73.7% of the 38 cases for higher to lower status, 85.7% of the 14 cases for lower to
higher, and 91.7% of the 12 cases for equals. Thus, factors other than status, such as
difficulty of the request, were apparently involved in the choice of more formal forms.
When the English and Japanese results were compared, clear differences were
noted. First, regarding the request forms used from lower to higher status, whereas
the English speakers preferred the less formal level (73.7%), the Japanese speakers
employed the formal level overwhelmingly, never using the informal level. Second,
although both groups of speakers in addressing a lower status person used the two
levels of formality, informal (or less formal) and formal, the Japanese speakers chose
the formal level more frequently (52.2%) than their English counterparts (14.3%).
All these differences again suggest that overall, Japanese native speakers use polite
forms according to the rule of discernment more strongly than English speakers.
However, a larger amount of natural data, together with more rigorous criteria for
determining the level of formality, is needed for future study to identify more pre-
cisely what kind of contextual factors govem the shift of formality level in Japanese
and English.
4.4. Opacity of hints in naturally occurring data
Following the model postulated by Weizman (1985, 1989, 1993), two analysts
coded the requestive hints in the data in terms of types and degree of opacity for two
dimensions. The first dimension, 'propositional content' of the request, contained 3
categories: (1) zero (no reference to the hearer, the act or any of its components, e.g.,
'There's a problem'), (2) component (reference to some component of the requested
act, e.g. 'Are there any batteries?'), and (3) act (reference to the requested act,
including some or all of its components, e.g. '(The sign) to change the master [for
the duplicating machine] came on but ...'.
The second dimension, 'illocutionary device', contained 4 categories: (1) zero (no
statement of illocutionary intent, e.g., 'Here's the mail' as a request to take the mail
to the mailroom); (2) stating potential grounder (giving a reason why the request is
necessary, e.g., 'The printer is running out of ink'); (3) questioning feasibility (ask-
ing about some prerequisite for the request to be granted, e.g., 'Do you have any
chalk? '); and (4) other (illocutionary device not falling into one of the three preced-
ing categories, e.g., 'I'm going to borrow this pen'). Table 6 presents the frequency
of occurrence of each of the categories within each of the two dimensions of opacity
in Japanese and English. l°
10 It should be noted that in this data, unlike Weizman's (1989), no examples of 'questioning bearer's
commitment' or 'referring to hearer's involvement' without referenceto the requestedact, and no com-
Table 6
Hints coded for opacity
Propositional scale Illocutionary scale
Zero Grounder Feasibility Other Total
Japanese
Zero 0% 2% 0% 0% 2%
(0) (1) (0) (0) (1)
Component 26.7% 17.8% 24.4% 4.4% 73.3%
(12) (8) (11) (2) (33)
Act 4.4% 8.9% 0% 11.1% 24.4%
(2) (4) (0) (5) (1 l)
Total 31.1% 28.9% 24.4% 15.6% 100%
(14) (13) (11) (7) (45)
English
Zero 0% 2.8% 0% 0% 2.8%
(0) (1) (0) (0) (l)
Component 11.1% 30.6% 25.0% 5.6% 72.2%
(4) (11) (9) (2) (26)
Act 0% 13.9% 2.8% 8.3% 25.0%
(0) (5) (1) (3) (9)
Total 11.1% 47.2% 27.8% 13.9% 100%
(4) (17) (10) (5) (36)
As shown in Table 6, the most frequent category on the propositional scale for
both Japanese and English was reference to related components of the requested act
(73.3% and 72.2%, respectively), followed by reference to the requested act (24.4%
and 25.0%, respectively). However, the most frequent categories on the illocutionary
scale differed in Japanese and English. Among the Japanese hints, zero expression of
illocutionary force was the most frequent (31.1%), and statement of grounder was
next (28.9%), followed by questioning feasibility (24.4%). The English hints, in con-
trast, were mainly statement of grounder (47.2%) and questioning feasibility
(27.8%).
The results of the two analyses combined show that the two groups differed in
their use of preferred hint strategies. As shown in Fig. 3, Japanese speakers used
the hint strategy 'component + zero illocutionary force' more frequently (26.7%)
as opposed to English speakers' relatively infrequent use of this strategy (11.1%).
Whereas both groups used approximately equal proportions of the 'component +
feasibility' strategy (24.4% vs. 25.0%), English speakers' most frequent strategy
was 'component + potential grounder' (30.6%), as opposed to Japanese use of
binations, e.g., of grounders and feasibility questions, were found. However, a few references to the
requested act did include reference to the hearer's involvement, e.g., 'He's going to check in later this
afternoon, so if you leave it out he'll see it, okay?'. These were all coded under 'act'.
this strategy (17.8%). These findings suggest that Japanese hints generally tend to
be more opaque than English hints, particularly in terms of the illocutionary
scale.
Percentage
English
30%
20%
10%
(1) (2) (3) (1) (2) (3)
Fig. 3. Frequenciesof major hint substrategiesby Japanese and English speakers.

(1) Component+ zero illocutionaryforce (e.g., Envelope for Pat.)
(2) Component+ feasibility(e.g., Do you have a transparency?)
(3) Component+ potential grounder (e.g., The copy machineisn't working.)
4.5. Discussion
The major finding of this portion of the study is that requestive hints occur fre-
quently, constituting more than half of both Japanese and English requests in the
data. This finding contrasts markedly with the frequencies reported for all other
sources of data. For example, in most DCT data in a variety of languages (e.g.,
Blum-Kulka and House, 1989; Weizman, 1993) hints make up less than 10% of
requests, and in Rose and Ono's (1995) Japanese multiple choice data, hints account
for up to 27.8% of requests. Even leaving out controversial Japanese elliptical state-
ments and English 'need' statements, hints still constitute 33 out of 78 Japanese
requests (42.3%) and 25 out of 67 English requests (37.3%) in our study. The most
obvious question that needs to be addressed here is why requestive hints are so fre-
quent in our naturally occurring data. We believe that at least two reasons related to
the characteristics of the situations observed may similarly account for both groups'
frequent use of hints.
First, in the institutional setting of the university office, a large amount of knowl-
edge is shared, and the relatively fixed expectations associated with the roles of the
participants are reinforced through daily interactions. Many of the requests in this
data, particularly those from higher to lower status, involve what House (1989) terms
a 'standard situation', in which:
"[r]ole relations are transparent and predetermined,the requester has a right, the requestee an obligation,
the degree of impositioninvolvedin the request is low, as is the perceived degree of difficultyin realiz-
ing it." (House, 1989:115)
The contextual information provided by a 'standard situation' is likely to bridge the

gap between the meaning of an utterance and its pragmatic force; thus it does not
involve a long process for interpretation. For example, when a lecturer says to the
office secretary, 'Excuse me, the copy machine is not working', the secretary usually
takes this utterance as the lecturer's request to come and check the machine because
her experience with the machine makes it possible for her to interpret the hint as a
request. Or she may immediately take the utterance as a 'conventional directive'
(Ervin-Tripp, 1976:51) because the inferential process has become routinized as a
result of the frequent occurrence of such statements in the same context. That is, the
relative indirectness of hints in standard situations does not ordinarily interfere with
the pragmatic clarity of the speaker's intention, as it might in a non-standard situa-
tion. Thus, although the low ratings of hints on the politeness scale by English
speakers was explained earlier by a lack of pragmatic clarity, the frequent use of
hints in our naturally occurring data is due in part to the fact that the participants can
derive the pragmatic clarity fairly easily, 'within reasonable limits' (Blum-Kulka,
1987: 141). If this is the case, many hints in such settings may cease to be 'off-
record', and become 'on record' (unequivocal formulation of a face-threatening act)
strategies, which include 'positive' and 'negative' politeness as well as direct
requests, as suggested by Brown and Levinson (1987).
Whereas standard situations can be seen as conducive to the use of hints as
requests, the relative ease of interpretation of hints in such situations does not
explain why a hint would be used more frequently than a conventionally indirect
request, or a direct one, for that matter. The second, related reason for using a
requestive hint may lie in the fact that in the university office where face-to-face
interaction takes place, even a higher status person could risk losing face if his or her
request is rejected by a lower status person. In such situations, the use of highly indi-
rect requests functions to avoid coerciveness more than use of conventionally indi-
rect requests. First, it could ease the force of the message by exploiting the hearer's
cooperation in deciphering it (Fraser, 1978). As discussed earlier, questioning feasi-
bility, which takes the form of an information-seeking question (e.g., 'Are there any
batteries? '), can be taken as an information question, a pre-request or a real request,
leaving the interpretation totally up to the hearer. The fact that the hearer is given the
power to derive the interpretation in turn decreases the possibility of any resentment
on the part of the hearer toward the speaker (Fraser, 1978: 15). Second, the use of
hints can also "secure a high degree of potential deniability" for the speaker as well
as the hearer (Weizman, 1989). Whether or not the speaker's requestive intent is
accurately interpreted by the hearer, the speaker could still pretend that he or she did
not mean it. Finally, in relation to the question of the hearer's participation, those
hints that are not formulated as questions (e.g., potential grounders like 'The printer
is running out of ink' and 'component + zero illocutionary force' such as 'tea') can
be seen as less imposing. This is because, as pointed out by Ervin-Tripp (1976), they
do not directly require a response from the hearer, the way questions (e.g., conven-
tionally indirect requests such as 'Can you/could you ... ?') and imperatives do.
The situational characteristics of a university office may explain the two groups'
frequent use of hints; however, they do not explain why each group prefers different
hint substrategies, 'component + zero' for Japanese and 'component + potential
grounder' for English. This difference could be accounted for by the social meaning
of hints, which as Kasper (1990) suggests is distinctively different across cultures.
The Japanese preferred strategy 'component + zero illocutionary force', which is
also evidenced in Kashiwazaki's (1993) study, reflects a lack of explicitness. As sug-
gested earlier, in Japanese it is generally considered impolite to provide more
explicit verbal information than is necessary in a given context (Miller, 1994; Wet-
zel, 1988). Thus, if the intent of the speaker to request something of the hearer is
obvious from the context, it would seem preferable to avoid the explicit expression
of as much of the request as possible. For example, the acts of ordering a box lunch
and taking the order were a kind of daily routine for a professor and a secretary;
thus, uttering the word o-bento (box lunch) was sufficient for the hearer to under-
stand what it meant. The professor avoided the explicit expression of her intent, per-
haps realizing that it can create a negative "impression of verbosity, directness or
aggressiveness" (Miller, 1994: 45). Such preference for implicitness could account
for the high degree of ellipsis in our Japanese data. ~1 This hint strategy serves to
show politeness to the hearer and at the same time to "express empathy between the
participants, symbolizing a high degree of shared presuppositions and expectancies"
(Kasper, 1990: 200). In other words, the use of requestive hints suggests that the
relationship between requester and requestee is close enough to share the same pre-
suppositions. Thus, the frequent use of these strategies by speakers regardless of sta-
res differences in our data (see Table 5) could reflect the fact that close relations
have already been established among the participants through daily interaction,
which shows in-group closeness (Kasper, 1990). Alternatively, it could suggest that
higher status speakers, in particular, used hint strategies as a 'volitional' strategy to
build solidarity with lower status speakers, notwithstanding previous observations
that lower status speakers tend to employ more hints in addressing higher status
speakers (Beebe and Takahashi, 1989; Takahashi and Beebe, 1993). When hint
strategies are employed in office situations, where in-group solidarity is easily fos-
tered, there appears to be an interplay of social status and social distance.
Building solidarity may also account for at least some of the frequent use of 'com-
ponent + grounder' hints, particularly those in the form of 'need' statements (71% of
grounders), in our English data. The frequently reported more pervasive use of con-
ventionally indirect (as opposed to direct or non-conventionally indirect) requests by
native speakers of English (e.g., House and Kasper, 1981; Blum-Kulka and House,
1989) is usually thought of as evidence of respect for the addressee's negative face,
that is, the need not to be imposed on or to be independent (Brown and Levinson,
1987). Although negative politeness in requests appears to be preferred in many
H The same 'communicative abbreviation' phenomenon is also highly observable within American
families and among membersof compatibleliving groups (Ervin-Tripp, 1976).
English speaking contexts, office situations where common goals need to be

achieved between status unequals may require more solidarity. In our data, it
appeared that both higher and lower status speakers attempted to build this solidar-
ity by personalizing their job related requests as their own. According to Diamond
(1996) in her study of status and power in social interaction, a request formulated
"as a subjective, personalized statement" (e.g., 'My need is to hear ...' instead of 'I
want to hear ...') weakens "the force of the ... speech act" (1996: 52-53). In her
naturally occurring English data, she found that high status speakers formulated
requests as personal needs and wishes to establish 'solidarity' and 'in-group' identity
when speaking with lower status speakers (1996: 74-78). From this perspective, the
use of a potential grounder like 'Ann T., if she comes around I need to talk to her'
by a department head to her secretary could be seen as conveying solidarity with the
secretary instead of imposing the administrator's will by using an imperative like
'Tell Ann T. to see me', or alternatively, instead of distancing herself from the sec-
retary by using a conventionally indirect request like 'Would you mind telling Ann
T. to see me? ,~2 By making the job related request more personalized, the higher sta-
tus speaker can minimize status difference, which in turn allows for both speaker and
hearer to pretend that they are equal. Bax (1986: 691) implies a similar interpreta-
tion of the use of hints to maintain 'a more reciprocal relationship' between status
unequals in offices.
In short, the preferred Japanese hint strategy of 'component + zero illocutionary
force' and the preferred English hint strategy of 'component + potential grounder'
can both be interpreted as building solidarity, albeit by somewhat different means.
The former emphasizes shared (implicit) knowledge and empathy, whereas the latter
appears to invite camaraderie and equality.
5. Conclusion
In relation to Blum-Kulka's (1987) notion of politeness as a balance between

pragmatic clarity and avoiding coerciveness, the findings of this study suggest that
this balance is affected by situational and cultural variables. First, we found an
apparent contradiction between the perceptions of decontextualized hints (except the
very formal Japanese one) as relatively impolite and the high frequency of use of
hints in a university office setting. Although decontextualized hints avoid coercive-
ness, they received lower politeness ratings (at least in the English data) as compared
to conventionally indirect requests. These lower ratings have been attributed to a
lack of pragmatic clarity, which decontextualized hints inherently entail due to a
multiplicity of meanings (Blum-Kulka, 1987). On the other hand, the requestive
intent of the contextualized hints in our naturally occurring data was usually per-
fectly clear in the routine office situation, so no lack of pragmatic clarity could have
~2 Ervin-Tripp (1976: 61-64) and Thomas (1983: 97-98) both pointed out the necessity of considering
politeness in relation to formality and context, graphically illustrating the negative consequences of
using conventionally more 'polite' (formal) requests with intimates.
interfered with interpretation, and consequently the level of politeness of the less
coercive hint formulation would not have been lowered. This suggests that the prag-
matic clarity of requestive hints is affected by the degree to which contextualized
knowledge and expectations are shared between interlocutors, and the type of situa-
tion, i.e., standard or non-standard, appears to exert a great influence on determining
the amount of such sharing.
This suggestion, however, needs further exploration in relation to Brown and
Levinson's ( 1 9 8 7 : 1 9 - 2 0 ) notion of 'utterances like hints' becoming 'on record'. It
is possible that many of the Japanese and English hints used in our study can be
taken as such hint-like utterances because they occurred when the speaker's intent
was fairly easy for the hearer to understand, due to their shared contextual knowl-
edge and expectations. Thus, our findings could be interpreted as involving two
types of hint formulations: one comprising real hints that are employed by the
speaker as the most indirect strategy to minimize the threat of face loss, and the other
consisting of hint-like statements that may not represent the most indirect strategy.
However, it remains uncertain precisely how hint-like statements would differ from
real hints, considering that both types share the same literal meaning, and could
carry a certain degree of deniability potential from the speaker's viewpoint. That is,
whereas hint-like utterances are endowed with pragmatic clarity due to highly con-
ventionalized contextual features, this type, like real hints, can still allow the speaker
to deny any interpretations made by the hearer because of the gap between the literal
meaning and pragmatic force. Another question to be raised in relation to hint-like
utterances is what would motivate the speaker to prefer hint-like requests to conven-
tionally indirect or imperative requests, with all three possibly being 'on record'
(Brown and Levinson, 1987). Further study is required to answer these questions.
In addition to the effects of situational variability, our findings suggest that there
is some cultural variability in the relative importance attached to explicitness in rela-
tion to the notion of politeness. The Japanese speakers' use of requestive ellipsis
shows that they say very little as compared to the amount of information apparently
considered appropriate from English speakers' perspective (Miller, 1994). However,
as discussed earlier, the Japanese view of politeness, that no more explicit verbal
information is given than is necessary when the pragmatic force is clear from the
context, may determine how much the speaker says. Thus, the amount of explicit
information necessary for pragmatic clarity in a given context appears to vary across
cultures. ~3
With respect to the overriding issue of how politeness and indirectness are related,
further study is also required to determine whether the notion of building solidarity
can help to explain the relative frequency of hint formulations, as opposed to con-
~3 It is possible that at least some cases of ellipsis in our Japanese data could more accurately be
accounted for by Grice's (1975) 'Cooperative Principle', in particular the 'Maxim of Quantity', not to
say more than is necessary, rather than the 'positive politeness' notions of empathy and group identity.
However, in practice it has proven difficult to separate the influences of these two principles, which
appear to move Japanese conversationalinteractionin the same direction,that is, toward ellipsis. Deter-
mining the relationshipbetween these two principles requires further study.
ventionally indirect strategies, which tend to create distance by explicitly marking

deference to the hearer. At the same time, we need to determine how "solidarity"
fits into the "politeness as balance of pragmatic clarity and avoiding coerciveness"
notion (Blum-Kulka, 1987). As we discussed earlier, speakers can express solidarity
(positive politeness) through hint formulations and at the same time they can also
avoid coerciveness (negative politeness) that would come from explicit expression of
requests. However, at least in Western cultures, the same strategy is not assumed to
achieve the two conflicting conceptions of positive and negative politeness Thus, the
idea of simultaneously achieving solidarity and less coerciveness by means of the
same strategy may constitute a novel concept that needs to be clarified and explored
through further investigation.
In terms of methodology, the results of this study clearly confirm previous find-
ings (e.g., Rose and Ono, 1995) that the data collection method affects the kinds of
requests produced. Very few potential grounders, feasibility questions and zero illo-
cutionary force hints have been produced on DCTs, but many appeared in our natu-
rally occurring data in university offices. This may be because DCTs elicit prototyp-
ical or 'stereotypical' forms (Beebe and Cummings, 1996: 75) of requests, i.e.,
conventional request forms (direct and conventionally indirect), whereas in actual
interaction, social lubricants are addressed to the "'psycho-social' dynamics of an
interaction between members of a group" (Beebe and Cummings, 1996: 77). Such
social lubricants including hedges, pre-requests and hints, which tend to appear more
frequently in natural data, may operate largely below the level of conscious,
reportable awareness, especially when responses are being written. The frequency of
hints in our data was certainly also affected by the kind of setting studied, which dif-
fered from the less institutionalized settings for most of the DCT requests that have
been reported. Thus, multiple data sources, including natural observation, and care-
ful consideration of situational factors should be considered essential for future
research in this area.
Regarding the system of analysis of requestive hints, Weizman's (1989, 1993)
system may need to be modified when dealing with oral requests in order to bring in
contextual information to distinguish more definitively between hints and the other
two categories of directness. For example, many of the 'component + zero illocu-
tionary force' hints could be reanalyzed as cases of deleted imperatives, i.e., implicit
direct requests, as they are categorized by Ervin-Tripp (1976) and Bax (1986). One
way to resolve the potential discrepancy would be to ask large numbers of native
speakers to provide interpretations of what has been deleted, based on intonation and
other kinds of contextual information.
Other limitations of this study include the relatively small number of requests
among speakers and hearers in certain categories of relationships, for example,
between equals in the Japanese data and between close friends in the English data.
Further study based on a larger sample of naturally occurring data should aim at
obtaining a more balanced representation in order to explore the effect of social dis-
tance on request form use. Additionally, in order to bridge the gap between the
politeness judgments of decontextualized forms and requests being used in actual
situations, such politeness judgments should be supplemented by judgments of
appropriateness o f various request forms in specific, systematically manipulated sit-

uations.
Appendix 1: Requests on questionnaire in order presented
English
1. I want you to show me the book. (less formal, CI: desire)

2. Would you mind showing me the book? (more formal, CI: willingness)
3. Could you show me the book? (less formal, CI: ability)
4. I was wondering if you could show me the book. (more formal, CI: ability)
5. Are you through with the book? (less formal, NI: hint, feasibility)
6. Show me the book. (less formal, D: imperative)
7. Will you show me the book? (less formal, CI: willingness)
8. I would like you to show me the book. (more formal, CI: desire)
9. Please show me the book. (more formal, D: imperative)
10. Were you finished with the book yet? (more formal, NI: hint, feasibility)
Japanese
1. Sono hon misete hoshiin dakedo. (informal, CI: desire)

I want you to show me the book (if possible).
2. Sono hon misete itadakemasen ka? (very formal, CI: willingness)
Couldn't I receive the favor of your showing me the book?
3. Sono hon misete kuremasen ka? (formal, CI: willingness)
Wouldn't you show me the book?
4. Sono hon misete itadakitaiin desukedo. (very formal, CI: desire)
I would like to receive the favor of your showing me the book (if possible).
5. Sono hon mou sunda ? (informal, NI: feasibility)
Are you through (with) the book yet?
6. Sono hon misete. (informal, D: imperative)
Show me the book.
7. Sono hon misete kureru? (informal, CI: willingness)
Will you show me the book?
8. Sono hon misete hoshiin desukedo. (formal, CI: desire)
I would like you to show me the book (if possible).
9. Sono hon misete kudasai. (formal, D: imperative)
Please show me the book.
10. Sono hon mou o-sumini narimashita ka? (very formal, NI: feasibility)
Were you (possibly) to the point of having finished (with) the book yet?
D = direct, CI = conventionally indirect, NI = non-conventionally indirect

Appendix 2: Examples of common request forms in naturally occurring data under

each category of directness (number of occurrences indicated in parentheses)
Japanese
Category Form Example English Gloss
DIRECT
'imperative' -te (6) chotto enpitsu kashite Lend me a pencil.
-te kudasai (11) kono nakakara sagashite Look (for it) in here please.
kudasai
'performative' onegai(suru) (4) yakuruto 80 sore onegai Yakult 80, I request that one.
CONVENTIONALLY INDIRECT
'permission' ii? (2) gomi onegaishite ii ? Okay if I ask you to take this
garbage?
ii desuka? (3) sensee, chotto kore ii Professor, is this all right?
desuka ?
'willingness' -te kureru (1) kore motte kureruka ? Will you take this?
-te kudasaru (1) ima chotto kite kudasaru ? Would you come ( to my
office for) a second?
-re itadakemasu (1) kopii-o sasete Would you mind if I make a
itadakemasuka ? copy?
'desire' hoshi (1) tsuyaku shite hoshinyo I want you to interpret (for
me), will you?
-tai (2) kopii shitaindesukedo I'd like to make a copy if
possible.
'possibility' -re moraenai (1) kore hakobuno tetsudatte Isn't it possible to help me
moraenai carry this?
NON-CONVENTIONALLY INDIRECT
'zero illocutionary force' (14) chotto, hanko-o Excuse me, (my) seal?
'questioning feasibility' (11) denchi arimasu ? Are there any batteries?
'stating potential grounder' (13) masutaa kokan detande- (The sign) to change the mas-
sukedo ter [sheets for the copier]
came on but ...
'other' (7) kagi, karimasune I ' m borrowing the key, right.
English
Category Form Example
DIRECT
'imperative' without please(4) Remind Carrie of the blue book.
with please (1) Take the keys to duplicating and pick
up (...) in the print shop, please?
'obligation' should (1) You should pass the word among your
troops that everyone ... is invited to the
career fair.
C O N V E N T I O N A L L Y INDIRECT
'ability' can you (5) Can you take the mail now?
could you (2) This was a gift from a student. Could
you do me a favor and eat it?
I'd appreciate it I'd appreciate it if you could take this
if you could (2) home tonight and type it up. If you want
me to compensate you in some way, I
will.
'possibility' can I (4) Carrie, can I have a transparency?
and/or could I (2) Could I borrow your stapler?
'permission' may I (1) May I please use your typewriter?
is it okay (1) Is it okay if I take one of these?
'willingness' will you ( 1) Will you see that Barry T. gets that,
please?
would you (1) Would you call down and see if we can
get some salmon [colored paper] ?
do you mind (1) Do you mind if I stick these in here?
do you want to (1) Do you want to just sign these?
' suggestion' why don't you (2) Why don't you just pull them out and
I'll tell her.
let's (1) Well, let's show the absences.
you could (1) You could send it to me.
NON-CONVENTIONALLY INDIRECT
'zero illocutionary force' (4) Here's the mail. [request for hearer to take mail to mail-
room]
'questioning feasibility' (10) Do you have any chalk?
'stating potential grounder' (17) I just need to drop these off for my folder.
'other' (5) I ' m going to steal the book.
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Carol Rinnert, Professor of International Studies at Hiroshima City University, teaches English and
sociolinguistics to undergraduate and graduate students. She earned her Ph.D. degree in linguistics at
SUNY/Buffalo. Her research interests include cross-cultural study of pragmatics, discourse, rhetorical
organization and semantics. She has published research in neurolinguistics, semantics, pragmatics and
L2 writing (including 2 articles in Language Learning, coauthored with Hiroe Kobayashi).
Hiroe Kobayashi, Professor of English at Hiroshima University, teaches English, applied linguistics and
pragmatics to undergraduate and graduate students. She earned her Ed.D. in TESOL at Teachers Col-
lege, Columbia University. Her research interests include development of L2 writing ability and socio-
pragmatic competence, and cross-cultural study of pragmatics, rhetorical organization and conversation
strategies. She has published research in applied linguistics, second language acquisition, and L2 writing
(including 2 articles in Language Learning, coauthored with Carol Rinnert).

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ELSEVIER Journal of Pragmatics 31 (1999) 1173-1201

Requestive hints in Japanese and English *

Received 13 August 1998; revised version 21 December 1998

Keywords: Requests; Hints; Japanese; English; Indirectness; Politeness

2. Background of the study

requestive behavior based mainly on discourse completion test (DCT) questionnaire

3. Perceived politeness of requestive hints

3.1. Questionnaire data

To address the first aim of investigating perceived politeness of hints in relation to

The Japanese requests on the questionnaire consisted of 7 relatively frequent

Japanese requests on the questionnaire included 2 semantic devices of conven-

3.2. Data collection

Table 3 presents m e a n scores o f perceived politeness o f the 10 requests in

Japanese Politeness Mean SD English Politeness Mean SD

Very formal More formal

Politeness ranks: 1 = most polite, 10 = least polite

Fig. 1. Perceived politeness by Japanese speakers.

Fig. 2. Perceived politeness by English speakers.

3.4. Effects of formality level and semantic content

Our findings confirm that Japanese perceptions of linguistic politeness depend

4. Naturally occurring requestive hints

4.1. Ethnographically collected data

To address the second aim of examining naturally occurring requests in an insti-

4.2. Frequency of hints in relation to other request strategies

Direct CI NI Total Direct CI NI Total

S>H 15% 10% 40% 65% S>H 6% 24% 28% 58%

S>H: speaker status higher than hearer cI = conventionallyindirect

4.3. Formality level of request forms in naturally occurring data

ment politeness, further investigation is necessary to clarify the concept of discem-

4.4. Opacity of hints in naturally occurring data

Propositional scale Illocutionary scale

Zero Grounder Feasibility Other Total

(1) (2) (3) (1) (2) (3)

Fig. 3. Frequenciesof major hint substrategiesby Japanese and English speakers.

The contextual information provided by a 'standard situation' is likely to bridge the

English speaking contexts, office situations where common goals need to be

In relation to Blum-Kulka's (1987) notion of politeness as a balance between

ventionally indirect strategies, which tend to create distance by explicitly marking

appropriateness o f various request forms in specific, systematically manipulated sit-

Appendix 1: Requests on questionnaire in order presented

1. I want you to show me the book. (less formal, CI: desire)

1. Sono hon misete hoshiin dakedo. (informal, CI: desire)

D = direct, CI = conventionally indirect, NI = non-conventionally indirect

Appendix 2: Examples of common request forms in naturally occurring data under

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