I. YAKOVLEV CHUVASH STATE PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY BULLETIN

communication, linguistic politeness, lingua franca, hedging, indirect speech acts, functions of politeness

The paper treats linguistic politeness in English-medium interaction as an active regulator of speakers’ communicative behaviour. As English continues to expand as a lingua franca, the likelihood of communicative failures increases, which calls for a model explaining how speakers can select constructive communicative options. The study draws on English-speaking respondents’ answers to a situational online questionnaire (19 closed-ended questions) and a set of dialogic extracts from English-language fiction texts. Descriptive statistics are combined with a functional-pragmatic analysis that relates politeness markers to their communicative effects. The functional triad of politeness is proposed, comprising pragmatic, axiological (value-oriented) and interactional functions. Acting together, these functions constrain the choice of communicative moves, increase the predictability of addressees’ uptake, and help sustain a cooperative mode of interaction. Key resources include conventional politeness formulae, hedging, phatic communion, and indirect speech acts. At the same time, the effects are context-sensitive: in conflictual episodes, polite forms may maintain appropriateness without necessarily securing cooperation. Politeness is therefore construed as a pragmatic regulator of constructive English-medium communication, while the triadic model provides a basis for further parametrising the appropriateness and acceptability of speech moves.

Sytnik, Olga Sergeevna – Candidate of Philology, Associate Professor of the Department of Foreign Languages, Empress Catherine II Saint Petersburg Mining University, Saint Petersburg, Russia, https://orcid.org/0009-0002-9903-5678, bochkova_os@pers.spmi.ru