Request-making in Russian spontaneous interaction
Request-making in Russian spontaneous interaction

Summary/Abstract: Requests are an integral part of everyday communication, where speakers simultaneously manage practical needs and interpersonal relationships. Prior research has often characterised Russian requesting behaviour as predominantly direct, highlighting the prevalence of imperatives as the unmarked request format. As a result, the use of indirect and mitigated requests remains underexplored. This study investigates how Russian speakers formulate requests in spontaneous interaction. The study draws on annotated transcripts from the speech corpus Odin Rechevoy Den’ (‘One Day of Speech’) and adopts an Interactional Sociolinguistics framework complemented by a discursive approach to politeness. The analysis shows that speakers’ linguistic choices reflect their orientations to interactional contingencies and vary across request types. Requests for material objects or resources tend to be formulated through interrogatives that orient to the availability of the requested item. Requests for low-cost actions tend to be realised through imperatives, reflecting the routine and immediate nature of the action, while those for high-cost actions and for the cessation of an ongoing activity tend to involve more elaborated and mitigated sequences. The findings also reveal that indirectness and mitigation occur across all request types and function as spontaneous and unmarked interactional resources.

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