The association of deference with linguistic form

BRUCE FRÄSER and WILLIAM NOLEN

As the study of language has evolved from the narrow confines of linguistic
form to include the study of language use, researchers have often found them-
selves either without the theoretical tools needed to pose and discuss the
issues or without a research methodology adequate to collect the appropriate
data.1 The study of deference and how it is associated with particular linguis-
tic structures appears to suffer from both difficulties. On the one hand, aside
from a few scattered comments in the recent linguistic and language-related
literature (cf. Goffman, 1971), there has been no account of what deference
is. Moreover, although speakers believe that they understood deference and
can recognize it, it is very clear that one cannot follow the linguistic tradition
and appeal directly to the intuitions of the native speaker to sort out the
degree of deference associated with particular expressions. To be sure, there
would be general agreement that the use of 'You ought to do that right now'
as a suggestion is far less deferential than suggest that you do that fairly
soon', but the use of such intuitions quickly breaks down on the more subtle
cases, and judges are inconsistent.
Nevertheless, this paper is an attempt to characterize deference and how it
appears to be systematically associated with certain types of linguistic forms.
We begin by presenting our view of deference, distinguishing it from polite-
ness with which it is often confused. We then report on two experiments
involving speakers of Spanish and English in which we employed a paired-
comparison methodology to determine both how deference was associated
with certain linguistic forms used for requesting as well as the similarity of
the associations across the two languages.

Deference

To get at the notion of deference, it is useful to begin by characterizing the

notion of a conversational contract. We can think of this in the following way.
On entering into a given conversation, each party brings an understanding of

0165-2516/81/0027-0093 $2.00 Intl. J. Soc. Lang 27 (1981) pp. 93-109

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94 Bruce Fräser and William Nolen
some initial set of rights and obligations that will determine, at least for the
preliminary stages, the limits of the interaction. This set of terms may be a
conventional set, for example, when two people are introduced in a formal
setting; or the set may be determined by previous conversations and an aware-
ness of the particulars of the situation. During the course of time or because
of a change in the context of interaction, there is always the possibility for a
renegotiation of the conversational contract, i.e., for the two parties to re-
adjust just what rights and what obligations they hold toward each other.
Such a change in the conversational relationship is clearly illustrated by two
people who begin an association under the circumstances of a formal intro-
duction and who subsequently marry. Even the change of setting may alter the
relationship; for example, moving from a formal meeting to a softball game.
The terms of the conversational contract fall into two types: general terms,
which govern all ordinary conversations; and specific terms, which hold be-
cause of the particulars of the conversation. General terms are those such as
the requirement for the hearer to wait his turn, for one individual to speak
the same language as the other, that both should speak sufficiently loud to be
heard, should speak clearly, and seriously. These general terms are seldom
negotiated away, since the success of an interaction rests upon their fulfillment.
The specific terms are far more interesting since they vary from contract
to contract and are subject to renegotiation. We can analyze these specific
terms into two types of conditions: what kinds of speech (illocutionary) acts
are permitted; what the content of a permitted speech act may be.2
That a particular conversational relationship limits the particular range of
speech acts would seem obvious. A child, for example, does not ordinarily
authorize a parent to do something; two close friends do not order one another
around; an employee is not free to criticize an employer; an atheist does not
excommunicate a wayward parishoner; and a felon does not christen a ship
(except, perhaps, in Boston). There may, of course, be some exceptions to
these examples, but the point still holds. The specific terms of a relationship
influence what types of speech acts can be seen as appropriate.
The content of a permitted speech act is even more strictly influenced
by the relationship. When you enter a physician's office, for example, you
implicitly extend the right to ask questions about you, your history and your
reason for coming. However, on going to a podiatrist you do not expect to be
asked questions about your sex life, unless you have negotiated that this is
relevant to the examination.
Since an individual's freedom to perform certain speech acts is in fact
restricted by the nature of the conversational relationship, it would seem
reasonable to attempt to account for the limitations in terms of some analy-
sis of the speech acts themselves. To date there have been at least eight
taxonomies similar or derived from the original analysis suggested by Austin

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 The association of deference with linguistic form 95
(1962), but the ones presented by Fräser (1975) and Searle (1977) appear to
suffer from the least defects. In both of these, the acts are grouped primarily
in terms of the intent of the speaker in performing the act. For example, for
directives such as requesting, ordering and soliciting, the intent is to get the
hearer to take some action; for representatives, such as saying, reporting or
admitting, to get the hearer to take the proposition conveyed as reflecting an
accurate state of the world; for commissives,* such as promising or swearing,
the intent is to undertake an obligation to carry out some actions, and so
forth. But the acts that must be negotiated in any real relationship cut across
these taxonomic lines. The category of directives, for example, contains the
acts of begging, requesting and ordering. However, there are no restrictions on
anyone against begging that seem relevant; everyone can request from another
though the content of the request may be restricted - I can probably ask
anyone the time but cannot ask most people their salary or the state of their
mental health or if they have overcome their drinking problem; and most
people cannot give orders to others except if this has been negotiated. The
same sort of difficulty arises with the other major categories. It seems clear
that the conversational limitations on the range of appropriate speech acts has
nothing to do with any existing analysis of these acts.
A far more insightful way to analyze those acts which require negotiation
is in terms of the degree to which they reflect the exercising of status by the
speaker.3 To request reflects an equal status, while to order reflects a higher
status. Thus, the right to order must be established before it is appropriate.
Similarly, to comment neutrally on something reflects equality; but to criticize
reflects a higher status in terms of expertise, i.e., a sense of dominance in that
domain. The right to criticize must be established between the two parties
before it is viewed as part of the conversational contract. In short, if the per-
formance of a speech act entails that the speaker is to be taken to have some
higher status position relative to the hearer, be it on a social scale, political
scale, intellectual scale, professional scale or musical scale, the right to perform
this act must be agreed to in some sense before it can be acceptably performed.
How a speaker and hearer go about agreeing to the relative dominance
between them is an issue we have little to comment on. Certain positions, for
example that of physician, lawyer and professor, carry with them a 'built-in'
status which comes into play whenever the individual functions in that role.
The professor, for example, has the right to authorize a student to take his
course but no right to authorize the same student to double-park, at least not
by virtue of his professorship. Other status can be conferred because of a
recognized expertise which may or may not come with an institutionalized
position; physicians are assigned a great expertise in their own specialty area,
less in other areas and often no expertise in dealing with personal problems.
However, the agreement on status may arise not from the conventions of a

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 96 Bruce Fräser and William Nolen
position but from a need for the situation; for example, when several people
are required to solve a problem and recognize that someone must serve as
leader or when there is a crisis and someone simply takes control. However
the agreement is reached, whether by convention, assumption or outright
open negotiation, the terms set do indeed influence what is henceforth deemed
acceptable behavior under those conditions for which the agreement holds.
Having provided an idea of what a conversational contract might involve,
let us now turn to the notion of politeness. In general, speakers operate within
the terms of the conversational contract and, in doing so, act in a way which
we call polite. To be polite is to abide by the rules of the relationship. A
speaker becomes impolite just in cases where he violates one or more of the
contractual terms. The speaker who insists on speaking unclearly, interrupting,
switching languages, or perhaps whistling for his dog while the other is speaking
is violating general terms of the conversational contract and is viewed by the
hearer as impolite. Analogously, the child who serves an order to a parent, the
employee who openly criticizes the policy of the company or the inquisitive
acquaintance who asks the harried businessman if his problem with impotence
has improved are all violating specific terms (as we have considered these
relationships) and thus heard as impolite. In general, any violation of the
terms of the conversational contract results in impoliteness.
Several clarifying remarks might be useful here. First, politeness is a property
associated with a voluntary action. Though one might view as impolite some-
' one who loudly interrupts a conversation, if it is established that the person
is mentally incapacitated, the assignment of impoliteness is removed.
Second, no sentence is inherently polite or impolite. We often take certain
expressions to be impolite, but it is not the expressions themselves but the
conditions under which they are used that determines the judgement of polite-
ness. This point was illustrated during a lecture several years ago when the
lecturer suggested that the expression 'shut up' was inherently impolite. A
gentleman in the front row volunteered the report that only recently he had
been holding a most attractive woman in his arms, a women with whom he
was on close terms, but one who would, for the moment, not stop talking. He
reported that he waited until a slight pause and then, looking at her intently,
uttered softly 'shut up'. He was convinced he was not impolite, and apparently
his companion felt the same.
A third aspect of politeness is that whether or not an utterance is heard as
being polite is totally in the hands (or ears) of the hearer. The speaker may
intend to act politely, may intend to abide by the terms of the conversational
contract — but fail, he may also intend to act impolitely, but the hearer may
take him to be acting politely.
Finally, there is, at least in common usage, the sense that sometimes a
speaker is very polite, sometimes impolite, sometimes extremely impolite; in

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 The association of deference with linguistic form 97
short, that there is some kind of a continuum of politeness rather than polite-
ness being a dichotomous notion. What is lacking, however, are any criteria
on which such a continuum might be based; for example, the relative severity
of a general as opposed to a specific term, the weight of performing an un-
warranted speech act as opposed to a permitted act but with an inappropriate
content and so forth. We have nothing to say on this and leave it without
further comment.
We now turn to the topic of this section, the notion of deference. As we
mentioned earlier, deference has not been the focus of study from the per-
spective of language use though Goffman (1971; 56) writes that: 'Deference
... is that component of activity which functions as a symbolic means by
which appreciation is regularly conveyed'. Several points of this definition
bear comment. First, deference is a component of an activity. The giving of
deference may be found in certain non-verbal activities such as holding open
a door for someone, permitting someone to talk first, bringing someone a
present. Of course, it is found in verbal activities as well, for example, when a
request for the time is expressed by 'Would you be good enough to tell me
the time?' Like politeness, deference is associated with an activity or with an
utterance and not with a sentence, per se.
Second, the sense in which Goffman uses the term 'appreciate' reflects a
giving of personal value to the hearer, the giving of status, and by doing so
creating relative symbolic distance between the speaker and the hearer. It is
well to keep in mind that one can 'depreciate' a hearer as well; that is, convey
lack of deference. What we will be discussing below will deal with some ways
in which the language codes the intent of the speaker to be more or less
deferent, to show more or less (relative) status to the hearer.
Third, in all cases, the appreciation (or depreciation) of the hearer is a sym-
bolic one. Just because a speaker chooses a means of symbolically appreciating
the hearer does not ascribe any real value thereto. If, for example, a woman
addresses her husband as 'Mr. X' she is showing a certain elevated deference
toward him; this does not imply, however, that she thinks him at that time to
actually have some greater status.
At this point it should be clear that by conveying more or less deference to
the hearer by the choice of one's language, the speaker is touching on one of
the terms of the conversational contract which we mentioned above: the
relative status that the two parties agreed upon. If, in the choice of language,
the speaker conveys a level of status that is consistent with the prior agree-
ment, the speaker is heard as being polite; if, however, the speaker errs and
conveys an inappropriate level of deference — assigns a status to the hearer
below that agreed upon or one too high — then in either case the speaker can
be taken to be impolite. For a friend to request by saying either 'Could I
possibly trouble you to take a moment to do it' or 'Do it' is to convey an
inappropriate status level and probably to be taken as impolite.

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98 Bruce Fräser and William Nolen
From this characterization, it should be clear why it is that deference and
politeness are often used interchangeably. Deference is not the same as polite-
ness, since deference is the conveying of relative status, but the inappropriate
use of deference can result in an impolite utterance, just in case the level of
status conveyed falls above or below that understood by the two parties.
Just as emergencies can alter what will count as impolite because the rules
of the relationship suddenly change, special situations can permit a rapid shift
in the acceptable level of deference. One instance which occurred to a col-
league highlights this well. He was at the time a lieutenant in the military
working with various colonels and flag-rank officers. A considerable degree of
deference was obligatory on the lieutenant's part by virtue of the separations
of rank in the military environment. During one briefing, however, a civilian
speaker was seized with a full-blown epileptic fit. The lieutenant was the only
person present who had experience in first aid. He took charge, but simul-
taneously gave abrupt orders such as 'Call the medics!' to one Colonel, 'Get
me some oxygen' to a Major General, and 'Here, take this' to a lowly Major.
All utterances conveyed a relative deference well below the acceptable thresh-
hold under normal circumstances. However, once the crisis was over, nothing
was said by any of the senior officers about the failure to fulfill the normal
canons of deference save one brief remark by the Colonel to the effect, 'Nice
job; well done'.

The experiments

The overall objective of our research on deference is to develop an understand-

ing of what contributes to the relative deference, of an utterance. Certainly
the way in which the speaker talks — for example, the tone of voice, speed,
timing — can play a role in what status is conveyed, as well as what sentence
the speaker actually uttered. Clearly this is a huge undertaking, and we opted
to focus first on the contribution of the sentence itself. We felt that the most
informative way to begin would be to select a set of sentences which could be
used to perform the same speech act but which differed from one another
in various ways. The task was to determine, first, if native speakers would
systematically associate a degree of deference relative to others in the set
and, if so, to determine then what linguistic factors might be creating this
difference in relative deference.

Experiment I

We selected the act of requesting and, for the first experiment, 25 English
sentences which reflect frequently used requesting forms. These sentences are

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 The association of deference with linguistic form 99
presented with the results and will not be listed here. Each sentence had '
as the subject, contained no vocatives such as 'hey', no preliminary expressions
such as 'excuse me' nor any politeness markers such as 'please'. The sentences
were short and without modifiers. In addition, the verb in each sentence was
'do' to avoid any unexpected associations with a specific predicate.
We postulated that each of the 25 sentences possesses a varying but un-
known degree of deference. One way of ordering these requests is to place
-them along points on a hypothesized psychological continuum which has the
attribute, deference, as a referent. The law of comportive judgment (Thurstone,
1927) provides a rationale for this ordering by assuming: (a) for each request
there is some modal discriminal process on a psychological continuum; (b)
that the distribution of all discriminal processes aroused by each request is
normal about the modal discriminal process. Discriminal process is a concept
that refers to the reaction of an individual when asked to make a judgment of
the amount of deference associated with one of the requests. What we wish to
do is scale the values of the modal discriminal process of each request with
respect to the dispersion (variance) of their discriminal processes. For example,
if we ask a group of subjects to make a judgment concerning the deference of
two requests, we may find that the second request is judged as more deferent
by 85% of the subjects. We might then assume that the modal discriminal
process of the second request is higher on the psychological continuum of
interest. In fact, the separation of the modal discriminal processes of the two
requests would be a function of the proportion of judgments that the second
request is more deferent than the first request. By continuing this process for
all request pairs, an estimate of modal discrimination for each combination is
obtained. These estimates are then standardized by a unit normal deviate
transformation of each proportion. Obtaining an average standardized dis-
criminal process for each request with reference to all other requests yields
an estimate of the scale value for each request.
To efficiently determine the deference continuum we developed a paired-
comparision computer program written in FORTRAN IV which accepts the
input data in two forms: (1) a matrix, where the entered values indicate the
frequency with which each row element is chosen over the respective column
elements for each statement; (2) the raw paired comparisons for each subject
for each sentence pair may be entered. The data input format is declared at
program execution time.
Either input format may be for an incomplete data-set (i.e., empty cells in
the frequency matrix are acceptable). The program deals appropriately with
these cells in computing the psychological scale values. Comparative judgments
for which the proportion of judgments is equal to 1.00 or greater than 0.98
or less than 0.02 may be dealt with in one of several ways which is left to the
user's discretion.

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100 Bruce Fräser and William Nolen
These judgments may be excluded from all scaling computations. The judg-
ments may be re scaled with values furnished by the user or these judgments
may be included in the analysis with their current proportions with the ex-
ception of 1.00 for which there is no Z value. Proportions of 1.00 are rescaled
0.999. This last option is the program default. Experience has shown that
rescaling by the user valuing unanimous responses with the highest and lowest
proportion of the remaining sentence pairs yields acceptable scaling solutions
and may be the best representation of the value of the sentence of the attri-
bute in question.
The computer program also offers the user several output options. The
user may print any of the three matrices (frequency, proportion and Z) used
in the scaling algorithm. While the program default is the printing of only the
final rank order scale of sentences, it is recommended that the user consider
the advantages of other output. The frequency matrix is of value when the
intial data structure was the individual sentence pairs. The proportion matrix
indicates which cells are being eliminated from the analysis and is also necessary
if the user is going to employ the scaling options mentioned above.
Dimensional limitations on the program allow for no more than 36 sen-
tences. This restriction seems reasonable given the fact that this number of
sentences would generate 630 possible paired comparisons.
Subjects for the first experiment were 40 college students from the Boston
area. We generated some 3000 pairs of requesting sentences using a random
number generator program and provided each subject with between 45 and
50 pairs, 10 to a page with the following instructions:

We are engaged in research to determine how people use language. We are

asking you to assist us by taking a few minutes to make some judgments on a
set of English sentences.
On the attached pages are printed sentence pairs such as the following:
Sit down.
I would appreciate it very much if you would sit down.
Each sentence of a pair could be used to make a request of the listener. How-
ever, one sentence of the pair usually implies a greater degree of deference —
respect for the hearer — than does the other one. In the example above, the
second sentence is the more deferential.
For each of the pairs of sentences, please write a check V in front of the
sentence which implies the greater deference. For the above case, you would
have placed the check before the T of the second sentence.
Since there is no information provided about a context in which the sen-
tence might be spoken, or how the speaker may be using intonation or stress
to convey certain attitudes, please try to consider just the sentences them-
selves. The length of a sentence should not be relevant to your decision.

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 The association of deference with linguistic form 101
Finally, there are no right or wrong answers. Take your initial judgment
for each pair, and, when in doubt, check the one that 'seems' more deferential.
Please make sure to place a check for each pair.
Thank you very much for your assistance. If you should want to know
more about our research, please give your name to the person collecting these
sheets, and we will send you the information.

This procedure resulted in some 2000 judged pairs from the 40 subjects. The
pairs were submitted to the program described above and a weighted rank-
order was obtained. The results are presented in Table 1.

Table 1.

Sentence Scale value

1. I'd appreciate it if you'd do that. 2.43

2. Will you do that? 2.37
3. Would you do that? 2.20
4. Could you do that? 2.19
5. How about doing that? 1.70
6. Would you mind doing that? 1.68
7. Why don't you do that? .60
8. Can you do that? .51
9. Won't you do that? .48
10. I suggest that you do that. .30
11. Couldn't you do that? .29
12. Do that, could you? .19
13. I would like you to do that. .17
14. Do that, wouldn't you? 1.14
15. Shouldn't you do that? 1.10
16. Do that, won't you? 1.09
17. That needs to be done. 1.07
18. Do that, will you? 0.96
19. I must ask you to do that. 0.86
20. Don't you have to do that? 0.84
21. Do that, couldn't you? 0.79
22. Can't you do that? 0.54
23. Do that, can't you? 0.40
24. Do that. 0.25
25. You have to do that. 0.00

For the scaling procedure adapted for this research, there is no fixed way
of interpreting the results. Of course, for a total range of 2.5, if one item is
scaled at 2.0 and another as 0.2, they reflect a meaningful difference on the
assumption that the entire procedure provides a meaningful scale. However,
when two items are closely scaled, any interpretation must be relatively sub-

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102 Bruce Fräser and William Nolen
jective. No one would argue that a difference of 0.01 on the scale reflects
a meaningful difference; even 0.10 along a scale of 3.0 units would seem
questionable. Thus, in approaching the scale, we present a highly subjective
analysis of the results, one that is in harmony with the scale values but also
with our intuitions about which sentences seem to fall together. In doing so,
we fully recognize that such intuitions and their frailty are precisely the
reason why one turns to a more experimental approach to obtain even
qualitative results on the issue of language use.
The scaling in Table 1 appears to confirm nicely our first hypothesis,
namely, that native speakers of English were able to make consistent judg-
ments about the relative degree of deference associated with a sentence used
to make a request. Given this result, we quickly move to the next question:
Are there linguistic features of the sentences which determine the relative
deference of the sentence? The answer appears to be affirmative, though this
is by no means proved with this research.
We can consider several apparent features of the sentences in the ranking.
First, the more deferential sentences are likely to have the interrogative rather
than the declarative or imperative syntactic form. This should not be surprising
since the speaker who uses an interrogative form is literally conveying a
tentativeness about his knowledge being questioned. Asking, 'Can you do
that' is at least apparently inquiring about the hearer's ability and apparently
giving the hearer a chance to decide for himself whether he can or cannot and
whether he wants or needs to take the implied request as the intended in-
terpretation of the sentence. Such indirectness on the part of the speaker is
surely giving certain options to the hearer that a request form such as must
request that you do that' denies. And such options would seem to enhance
the status of the hearer, the essence of deference.
A second feature of the ranking is the fact that the more deferent the
sentence, the more likely it is to have a conditional form rather than the
indicative one. For example, 'Could you do that' was judged to be more
deferential than 'Can you do that'. This, also, is in accord with the notion of
giving the hearer options, since the conditional conveys a certain tentativeness
on the part of the speaker that the corresponding indicative form lacks.
A third feature involves the presence of negative markers. They generally
were ranked lower than their affirmative counterparts. The negatives in these
sentences were generally in combination with a modal, for example, 'Can't
you do that'. Whereas the question 'Can you do that' has the close para-
phrase 'Is it the case that you can do that', the paraphrase of the negative
can't is usually not taken to be 'Is it the case that you cannot do that' but
rather 'Is it not the case that you can do that'. Thus, though we have some
general trends, we cannot generalize easily about the entire 25 sentences.
Nevertheless, within the 25 example sentences we included 7 sentences

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 The association of deference with linguistic form 103
5
involving some form of the modal can. These are presented with their ranking
in Table 2. What is important about these eight sentences is that there are at

Table 2.

Sentence Ranking Value

1. Could you do that? 4 2.20

2. Can you do that? 8 1.57
3. Couldn't you do that? 11 1.39
4. Do that, could you? 13 1.23
5. Do that, couldn't you? 20 .99
6. Do that, can you? - -
7. Can't you do that? 22 .57
8. Do that, can't you? 23 .49

most three ways in which one can differ from another: the form of the modal
is indicative versus conditional (can/could)', the modal is positive or negative
(can/can Y); the sentence is in the interrogative or imperative-tag form with
the modal can ('Can you do that'/'Do that, can you').6 We initially held a
very strong hypothesis concerning the role that these three linguistic features
would play in the assignment of deference to sentences in which they occurred:
first, that all interrogative forms would be judged more deferent than the
imperative forms; second, that, within each of the initial divisions, sentences
with a conditional modal would be judged more deferent than the indicative
cases; and third, that, within each of these four divisions, the sentence with
the positive modal would be more deferent than the negative one. This hy-
pothesis can be represented by Figure 1. The numbers in the parentheses in
the figure correspond to the ranking of the 8 sentences in Table 2 and there-
fore give an indication of the degree to which this strong hypothesis was
confirmed.
There are three clear results which emerge from considering these 8 sen-
tences: Whenever a pair of sentences differed in only one way:
1. A conditional sentence was judged more deferent than the corresponding
indicative one: (1/2; 3/7; 4/6; 5/8).
2. An interrogative sentence form was judged more deferent than the
corresponding imperative + tag form; (1/4; 2/6; 3/5; 7/8).
3. A sentence with the positive modal was judged to be more deferent than
the corresponding one with the negative modal; (1/3; 2/6;4/5; 6/8).
Several sentences were judged in ways which ran counter to the strong hy-
pothesis of deference ordering shown in Figure 1. The most flagrant violator
was the sentence 'Can't you do that' (negative-indicative-interrogative) which
was predicted to be in fourth place but slipped to seventh, a clear seventh.

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104 Bruce Fräser and William N ölen
-Positive (1)
-Conditional:
-Negative (3)
Interrogative^
-Positive (2)
^Indicative r
* Negative (7)

-Positive (4)
Conditional^
-Negative (5)
Imperative + Tag:
-Positive (6)
^Indicative =
-Negative (8)

Figure 1.

This caused the claim that all interrogatives would be judged more deferent
than imperative + tag cases to be discontinued. In addition, the 'Can you do
that' and 'Couldn't you do that' were reversed in the predicted rank, though
the difference here is relatively small. In general, we see the results of these
8 sentences to strongly corroborate the general hypothesis that particular
linguistic forms do contribute substantively and systematically to the assign-
ment of deference to a sentence.
The same phenomenon, involving the modal wz//, showed mixed results. On
the corroborative side, 'Will you do that' (2) was judged to be more deferent
than it's negative version 'Won't you do that' (9), the imperative 4- tag versions
'Do that, will you' (18) and 'Do that, won't you' (17). In addition, 'Would you
do that' (3) was judged to be more deferent than 'Do that, would you' (14)
and this latter more deferent than 'Do that, won't you' (17). However, the
'will you' form (2) was seen to be slightly more deferential than the 'would
you' case (3) and the 'Do that won't you' (17) more than the 'Do that, will
you' (18), though here again, a scale difference of 0.14 or so should not be
taken to be meaningful.
Our initial feeling was that the will cases in whatever version would be
judged to be more deferential than the corresponding can sentences. This was
confirmed. 'Will you do that' (2) was rated over 'Can you do that' (8) by a
sizeable margin though the 'would you' form was judged only slightly more
deferent than the 'could you' version. 'Won't you do that' (9) was rated well
above 'Can't you do that' (22) as were the 'Do that, will you' and 'Do that,

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 The association of deference with linguistic form 105
won't you' sentences. Finally, 'Do that, wouldn't you' (14) was judged more
deferent than 'Do that, couldn't you' (20).
There are several next steps which ought to be taken before any stronger
conclusions can be drawn. First, what, if anything, does the presence of a
'real' verb such as 'help' or 'try that on' do to the deference judgments?
Second, what is the effect of 'please'? Third, what is the effect of the phrase
'for me' as in 'Can you do that for me?' on the judgments? And fourth, what
is the effect of certain tune expressions such as 'now', 'sometimes', 'later on'
and the like when they are included in the sentences? In the neatest possible
world, such additional linguistic expressions would provide some quantitative
systematic contribution, either positive or negative, to the perceived deference
of any given sentence relative to any other being used for the same task. It is,
of course, doubtful that we live in such a world, but we are hopeful of finding
some additional systematic trends from these and other linguistic formatives.

Experiment II

Having confirmed our initial hypothesis that English speakers could system-
atically assign a relative level of deference to sentences used to request, we
turned to the question of whether speakers from another language would mirror
the English-speaking judges. Fräser (1979) argued that the strategies used to
perform a particular speech act are essentially the same across languages. For
example, if 'can you... .' can count as a request in English, the semantically
equivalent sentence in Spanish, Twi or Chinese will be used as a request as
well. What was of particular interest, however, was the degree to which the
perceived relative degree of deference of the English sentences would be
mirrored by other language groups.
Subjects for this experiment were 25 college students in the Boston area
who spoke Spanish as their first language. The sentences chosen were 14 of
the 25 used by the English speakers, chosen to reflect the full range of the
English results. The same manner of presentation of the stimulus sentences
was used as earlier, and the same analysis was performed. In addition, the
original English data was reanalyzed for only the 14 English sentence stimuli
pairings corresponding to the Spanish sentences. These results are presented
side-by-side in Table 3, with the number in parenthesis in the Spanish data
indicating the corresponding English sentence.
Several things are clear from these results. First, there is very close agree-
ment on the rank ordering of the 14 sentences. Leaving aside Spanish sentences
numbers (3), (10) and (6) which fail to correspond closely to the ranking of

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106 Bruce Fräser and William Nolen
Table 3.

English Value Spanish Value

1. You have to do that. 0.00 1. (2) Haz eso 0.00

2. Do that. 0.73 2. (1) Tienes que hacer 0.48
eso.
3. I must ask you to do 2.16 3. (8) Necesita hacerse. 1.02
that.
4. Don't you have to do 2.47 4. (4) 6 No tienes que 1.69
that? hacer eso?
5. I would like you to do 2.71 5. (3) To debo pedir 2.15
that. que hagas eso
6. Shouldn't you do that. 2.81 6. (12) 6 For que no haces 2.39
eso?
7. I suggest that you do. 3.49 7. (6) 6 No deberias hacer 2.39
eso?
8. That needs to be done. 3.50 8. (10) 6 Puedes hacer eso? 2.64
9. Would you mind doing 3.65 9. (7) Te sugiero que 2.91
that. hagas eso.
10. Can you do that? 3.74 10. (5). 6 Me qustaria que 3.08
hicieras eso?
11. How about doing that? 3.76 11. (9) £Te molestaria 3.12
hacer eso?
12. Why don't you do that? 3.87 12. (11) 6 Que te parece 3.25
hacer eso?
13. Could you do that? 4.60 12. (13) iPodrias hacer eso? 3.63
14. I'd appreciate it if you'd 5.28 14. (14) Te agradeceria si 4.08
do that. hiceras eso.

the corresponding English sentence, the revised rank ordering is the following:
E: l 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
S: 2 1 4 3 5 8 6 7 9 10 11
For example, 'Do that' and 'You have to do that' were ranked the least defer-
ential in English; they were ranked similarly in Spanish. At the other end of
the spectrum, 'Could you do that' and 'I'd appreciate it if you'd do that' were
ranked the most deferential in both languages. Very little difference in ranking
was found in between. It was impossible to reanalyze the data with only 11
examples because the number of English examples, already reduced from 25
sentences to 14, did not provide sufficient numbers for each pairing of the
11 sentences with the other 10 to insure reliable results.
What about the three maverick sentences? The first, Spanish (3) ('Necesita
hacerse') was judged far less deferential than its English counterpart ('That
needs to be done'). Our best estimate for this difference lies in the translation
of the English which might better have been 'Hay que hacerlo' or perhaps
'Se necesita hacerlo9 since the '/o' of Spanish which though often translated as

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 The association of deference with linguistic form 107
'it' also has the sense of 'that' when the reference is not specific. The difficulty
here, of course, lies in finding the best corresponding forms in two languages,
a task for which we know no guaranteed way.
The second unexpected difference involves the Spanish example (10) ('LMe
gustaria que hicieras esoT) paired in the English sentence (5) ( would like
you to do that'). Here we speculate that the use of the imperfect subjunctive
form 'hicieras' creates a sense of deference greater than the same form in
English. The use of subjunctive between the two languages has been often
commented on, and this pair may highlight one way in which this usage
functions. The last difference between the two rankings involves Spanish
sentence (6) and English sentence (12), 'Why don't you do that?' Here,
rather than the Spanish sentence being in the unexpected place, we find the
English example falling too near the high end of the deference continuum.
This is true for both the initial scaling (Table 1) and the present one (Table 3).
This position cannot have arisen because of a lack of comparisons between
this sentence and the other stimuli since sentence (12) was compared at least
as often as the average number of comparisons. We can provide no adequate
reason for this anomaly in the ranking.
In conclusion, we have attempted to do several things in the course of this
paper. First, we set out what we see to be the notion of deference, in contrast
to the notion of politeness, and placed it within the context of a conversational
contract which governs the limits of a given verbal interaction. We then de-
scribed a methodology involving paired-comparisons which we used with both
English- and Spanish-speaking students in an attempt to determine how they
assigned deference to certain requesting forms. Not only did we find the
students consistent in assigning deference, but the ranking across the two
languages were very similar, thus supporting the view that certain semantic
phenomena (e.g., negation, subjective) function similarly across languages. It
would be tempting to draw broad, far-reaching conclusions based on this
preliminary data. We will not. We do believe, however, that the results both
support the use of the paired-comparison methodology for certain aspects of
experimental research on language use and that they do support the claim
that learning how to use a second language involves the grammatical code
much more than acquiring any new pragmatic abilities.

Boston University

Notes

We would like to express our appreciation to both Jean Fräser and Ellen Rinteil for
their insightful and constructive comments on earlier versions of this paper. Their
lack of deference in tendering their thoughts made the revising go more quickly.

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108 Bruce Fräser and Wüliam N ölen
2. For a discussion of the notion of speech acts, see Searle (1969) or Fräser (1979).
For the purposes here, a speech act can be taken as some act performed by the
speaker through the saying of something; for example, a request or a promise. It
does not refer to any effect the speaker's utterance might have on the hearer; for
example, to persuade, frighten, convince, or anger him.
3. We cannot provide an adequate independent characterization of the notion of
'status'. In fact, whatever 'status' is taken to be, what determines the need for
deference may go beyond it Nevertheless, we shall use the term status in our dis-
cussion in hopes that our main thesis will be made clear and ask the reader to read
charitably.
4. The program listing with documented sample input and output is available on
request from the authors.
5. We inadvertently omitted the sentence 'Do that, can you' from the initial group of
25 sentences. However, in an earlier unpublished study we had obtained the judg-
ments of 20 students on all combinations of the full 8 can sentences being discussed
here. The results of that study were replicated by the present one with the exception
of a reversal of sentences 7 and 8 (not judged very different in either study). But
more important, the earlier study clearly placed 'Do that, can you' between 'Do
that, couldn't you' and 'Can't you do that'. Thus we feel confident in entering this
omitted sentence into the data though without any scaled value.
6. Various authors have written on the status of the imperative + tag sentence forms
used as directives. The most detailed analysis to date can be found in Fräser (1979)
in which it is argued that they derive from the corresponding interrogative forms by
a transformation which appears to be unique to English. The rule can be stated
roughly as the following:
Modal-j>ow-VP = VP, Modal-jOM
with the conditions (1) that the modal be some form of can or will; and (2) that the
verb be one marked as denoting an action believed to be under voluntary control
The condition excludes sentences such as 'Might you leave tomorrow' from be-
coming *'Leave tomorrow, might you', the second condition excludes sentences
such as 'Can you metamorphize into a cockroach' from becoming *'Metamorphize
into a cockroach, can you'. We should note as well that the tag of these sentences
is not the same tag as in sentences such as 'He can go, can't he'. For these later
declarative sentences, the tag is not restricted to the you subject and, more import-
antly, undergoes a polarity change from the polarity of the main declarative clause.
The imperative + tag cases never occur with a negative imperative, for example,
*'Don't sit down, can/can't you'. Finally, the periphastic form of the modal, for
example be able for can, does not function similarly: 'Are you able to pass the salt?'
is a very sarcastic request, if a request at all.

References

Austin, J.L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press.
Fräser, B. (1975). Hedged performatives. In Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3, Speech Acts,
P. Cole and J. Morgan (eds.). New York: Academic Press.
- (1979). On requesting: A study in pragmatics. Unpublished manuscript, Boston
University.
- (in press). Pragmatic research in second language acquisition.

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 The association of deference with linguistic form 109
Goffman, E. (1971). Relations in Public. New York: Basic Books.
Searle, J. (1977). A classification of illocutionary acts. Language in Society 5, 1-23.
- (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

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