Effect of request type and situational features on negative politeness in requests

Politeness Theory (Brown & Levinson, 1987) implies that the negative politeness in requests should increase with the degree of threat to the hearer's negative face. The present study asked whether this effect depends on the type of request being made. Participants produced either borrow requests or stop action requests in situations that involved either a high threat or low threat to the hearer's face. As hypothesized, greater face threat produced more negative politeness (apologies and promises) in borrow requests but not in stop action requests.