The association of deference with linguistic form

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 themselves either without the theoretical tools needed to pose and discuss the issues or without a research methodology adequate to collect the appropriate data. The study of deference and how it is associated with particular linguistic 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 politeness with which it is often confused. We then report on two experiments involving speakers of Spanish and English in which we employed a pairedcomparison 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.