This master’s thesis deals with the comparison of politeness strategies used in English and Serbian/Montenegrin for realizing the speech acts of request and apology in e-mails and text messages. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted to identify similarities and differences between the two languages in the realization of requests and apologies in various situational contexts. Multiple-Choice Discourse Completion Task (MDCT) has been completed by 53 English and 53 Serbian/Montenegrin native speakers. The questionnaire includes three request and three apology situations, each situation being controlled by variables social power and level of imposition in order to determine their influence on the choice of a politeness strategy.
The results indicate that there are more similarities than differences between English and Serbian/Montenegrin speech communities and their perception of politeness. Both groups predominantly use the combination of positive and negative politeness, while the direct (on-bold) and indirect strategies are generally avoided.
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