The Illocutionary Force of Directive Speech Acts as Perceived by Native Speakers of Polish and Dutch

This contribution is a part of a pilot study on the mutual perception of politeness standards in Poland and in the Netherlands. In an online survey, we asked native speakers of Polish and Dutch to evaluate twenty utterances in terms of politeness. In the next step, the participants were asked to choose a term that, in their view, suits the evaluated utterance: is it, for example, a request, an order or maybe a suggestion? We examined how the respondents perceive the illocutionary force of different subtypes of directive speech acts in an informal context and whether there is a relationship between politeness and speech act names. The results show that there is a difference in how the Polish and Dutch respondents perceive the illocutionary force of speaker-controlled directive speech acts. However, there seems to be no link between the illocutionary force and the syntactic form of the evaluated utterances. The choice patterns of terms seem rather to be motivated by modality markers.