Politeness variation in English requests when texting: A study of Hong Kong and Mainland China

Contributing to the East-West debate in politeness, a number of cross-national studies on how Chinese interlocutors engage with speech acts have been conducted (see Chen et al., 2013). However, such research between Chinese regions has been sparse, despite the diversity of dialects, cultures, and histories. One conspicuous variance is Mainland China and Hong Kong (HK), the latter having recently been relinquished by Britain in 1997 and maintaining its dual official languages of Chinese and English. This elevation of English is apparent when measuring proficiency, with HK having a much higher proficiency (EF EPI, 2023) despite both mandating English studies in pre-tertiary education. Such proficiency is perhaps due to HK’s greater access to Western cultures on social media, text-messaging, and entertainment platforms. This appears influential on politeness expression. Guo et al. (2012) found that preference for acceptance strategies in compliment responses was positively correlated with their Mainland Chinese participants' familiarity with English. The authors speculated the cause as Western cultural influence, which, as one participant from Yuan (2002) puts it:


through all kinds of channels, their languages . . . have all kinds of impact, in fact. From things like video tapes, in all aspects, even a popular pet phrase, things like that, right, from Hong Kong and Taiwan movies, from the west, when you hear them, you'll learn to say them. (p.215)


We took a new angle towards investigating politeness variation between Chinese regions by analyzing English requests from Mainland Chinese and HK undergraduate students in the context of WhatsApp group chats during university group projects, where English is used as a lingua franca. We innovated the DCT method by asking participants to use their mobile phones to produce requests, affording them many of the communicative resources from WhatsApp. We incorporated a first-order politeness approach by instructing participants to produce requests requiring varying levels of politeness. These requests produced by each group were analyzed along dimensions that have been indicated as important variables when investigating politeness orientation, especially in text-messaging (e.g. McSweeney, 2018): strategies, modifiers, text-message length and text-messaging features. A preliminary analysis shows that the well-known Mood Derivable and Preparatory strategies are frequently used in each group, although Mainland Chinese have a stronger preference for Preparatory strategies. Additionally, each group produces text messages of similar length, with the Grounder and Text-messaging Feature modifiers as highly preferred overall. Interesting differences emerge when looking at the subset of messages produced under different politeness requirements.