"Hello stranger" : the influence of the social context on linguistic politeness in Hungarian and Polish

The article presents usage of address forms in Polish and Hungarian in requests addressed to a stranger. Addressatives are treated as linguistic manifestations of perceiving and building an interpersonal relationship, and their choice is influenced by the way of perceiving a given social context, and the way of categorizing the participants and the activated schematic linguistic and extralinguistic knowledge. The results presented in the article show the conventional use of address forms in Hungarian and Polish, and the differences in the construction of Polish and Hungarian requests (87 respondents in total, 870 requests, which constituted 35% of the entire survey). The article is based on two studies – one conducted using the DCT (discourse completion test) method among Hungarian and Polish-speaking language users, and the second examining the attitude of young, professionally active people to using T/V forms. As the results show, the biggest difference between Polish and Hungarian language users can be observed when interacting with similar aged stranger. While Polish data providers used more frequently V forms, and formal lexical elements, Hungarians commonly used T forms. The attitude test showed also, that T forms are perceived by Hungarians as common and neutral choice, while V forms are frequently used in strongly formal contexts. Social context of interaction shows strong influence on the structural choices made in each language eg.: indirectness or epistemic modality expressed in requests. The phenomenon of linguistic politeness is presented and analyzed as a linguistic manifestation of the perception of the social context, and the main motivation for the made linguistic choices is not etiquette or norms, but adequate language choices – implemented not only through addressing forms, but also the structure of the request – to the social context and goals of the participants of the interaction (Watts 2003, Watts & Locher 2005).