Requests in American and British English: A contrastive multi-method analysis presents a cross-cultural comparative study of requests in American English (AmE) and British English (BrE). The book comprises six chapters. Chapter 1 provides the background to the study, with a particular focus on the validity of discourse completion tasks (DCT). Flöck indicates that one main problem with DCTs is that they cannot produce data representative of naturally occurring discourse.
Chapter 2 is the longest chapter of the book with four main parts: (i) theories of pragmatics, (ii) data collection instruments and instrument-induced effects on the production of speech acts, (iii) prior studies of the structure of requests in English, and (iv) definitions of requests.
In chapter 3, Flöck provides an overview of the database used, the procedures of data collection employed, the coding categories applied, and the statistical treatment of the data. A total of four data sets are used in the study, with two sets retrieved from the British component of the International Corpus of English and the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English and the other two elicited from DCTs. All of the requests identified are categorized into (i) request head acts and (ii) modification strategies. To examine the statistical significance of the data, two tests—Pearson's chi-square and logliner analysis—are conducted.
After a description of the methodology, Flöck reports on the findings about the use of request strategies in AmE and BrE naturally occurring conversations in chapter 4. A total of 520 request sequences are analyzed. The study finds that AmE and BrE request head acts are realized more often by imperatives than by declaratives and interrogatives, and that AmE and BrE speakers show a strong preference for mitigating modification strategies over aggravating ones.
The findings about the use of request strategies in the four data sets are subsequently presented in chapter 5. A total number of 1,040 requests are examined. It is found that while requests are most frequently realized by imperatives in naturally occurring conversations, they occur most often in interrogative form in DCT-elicited conversations. It is also observed that both AmE and BrE speakers in the DCT-elicited conversations similarly employ more mitigation modification strategies than aggravation ones as those in the naturally occurring conversations.
The final chapter summarizes the findings of the study and provides theoretical, methodological, and practical implications and future research directions. In particular, Flöck highlights the importance of the use of authentic data in cross-cultural pragmatics research as it helps researchers better understand the complexities of language use as social interaction.
Overall, Flöck makes two significant contributions in her publication. First, the study compares the use of request strategies in AmE and BrE naturally occurring conversations. Second, it challenges the validity of DCTs and systematically compares request strategies and their frequency distributions in the conversational data to DCT-elicited requests. This book is a truly original contribution to the field of cross-cultural pragmatics. For those working in pragmatics, linguistics, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis, it is an important and interesting read.
