Tact under the microscope

Englishmen are well-known for struggling for the right words

Tweet

Print Share

 

Also In The News

Blair: I did what I thought was right
Tony Blair has revealed that he will step down as prime minister on June 27th.

• Bank rates hit 5.5 per cent
• Leicester cruise to Premiership triumph
• Howard sets sights on Europe

 

Sunday, 13, May 2007 08:29

British scientists are examining ways in which Europeans use language to avoid potentially embarrassing situations.

Researchers from the University of York used a technique of 'conversation analysis' to assess ways in which people modified the words they use according to the context in which they were speaking.

They compared ordinary social conversation with awkward conversations - including out-of-hours calls to doctors, emergency calls to the police and other face-to-face service requests - in an attempt to work out how people change their tone and manner.

Their findings show that people are more polite when they need to signal their understanding of the difficulty the recipient of a request may have in dealing with it.

For example, with someone familiar the request might be simply to "pass the sugar".

Others, however, might receive modified requests: "Could you pass the sugar? Would you pass the sugar?" Or the entirely respectable "I wonder if you might be so good as to pass the sugar?"

Professor Paul Drew, who led the study, commented: "To date, the mechanisms through which social solidarity is promoted linguistically in interaction are little understood.

"By focussing on speech activities likely to be associated with conflict between participants, we have come up with surprising results which show systematic, and previously undocumented, connections between the construction of a sentence and the context in which the interaction takes place."