Utilitarian relevance and face management in the interpretation of ambiguous question/request statements |
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Authors: | Virginie Demeure Jean-François Bonnefon Éric Raufaste |
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Institution: | CNRS and Université de Toulouse, Toulouse, France. demeure@univ-tlse2.fr |
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Abstract: | Often, requests are made in an indirect manner and phrased in such a way that they can also be construed as questions. For example, the sentence “Is there any coffee left?” can be construed either as a question about coffee or as a request for coffee. This article offers a combined test of some key predictions of two approaches to the disambiguation of question/request statements: (1) the face management approach, which gives a prominent role to variables such as status and potential loss of face; and (2) the utilitarian relevance approach, which gives a prominent role to the goals pursued by the speaker at the time he or she issues the statement. Ambiguous question/request statements provide a natural test bed for the latter approach in particular. A board game paradigm is developed to allow for a clean, orthogonal manipulation of all variables. The results wholly support the utilitarian relevance approach and offer new perspectives on the face management approach. |
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