‘‘Yes, tell me please, what time is the midday flight from Athens arriving?’’: Telephone service encounters and politeness

Abstract

Telephone service encounters make for a particularly interesting context which concerns both features of telephone conversations and a number of unique characteristics associated with face-to-face service encounters. This article investigates the politeness of telephone service encounters in Greek and British English by focusing on the degree of directness employed by the two language and cultural groups in question and by examining whether the two groups assess the same social variables similarly. It also examines the specific function that the markers ‘‘please’’ and ‘‘parakalo’’ take on in the context of requests and whether these markers are used with the same degree of requestive directness in the same framework.

Results from the study indicated that the opening requests produced by Greek callers ringing an airline’s call centre were significantly more direct than the requests produced by British English callers. It is argued in the present paper that this higher directness is motivated by clarity, goal orientedness, and minimising imposition. As it also achieves social distancing, it can be seen as expressing negative rather than positive politeness in the specific context examined. Findings from this study further indicated that the markers ‘‘please’’ and ‘‘parakalo’’ were employed with a different degree of requestive directness by the two language groups. The marker ‘‘parakalo’’ was found to be less conventionalised than the marker ‘‘please’’ and its use further supported the negative politeness of the Greek requests examined.