An investigation of the politeness phenomenon in hotel service encounters

This study explores the politeness phenomena displayed by employees in a hotel, focusing on the delivery of directives when serving the guests at the Front Desk. Naturally-occurring service encounters collected in a four-star hotel in China are transcribed and analyzed at the sentence-level and discourse-level, both quantitatively and qualitatively, to obtain a fuller and more holistic picture of the phenomena. Interviews with the hotel staff are also analysed.;The use of institutionalised language is reported to be most significant in communicating formality and courtesy and staff constrain their linguistic behaviour to comply with the goals of the hospitality business. The staff are trained to conform to a standard realisation of speech acts to upkeep the standard of service.;The analysis shows that while the hotel staff perform the tasks of checking-in, checking-out and handling enquiries, the most often used directives are requestives and stating requirements. Orders and commands are rare. The analysis, based on Brown and Levinson's politeness framework, reveals that, to reduce the face threat of different directives, negative politeness strategies are more often used, though positive strategies and bald-on-record strategies are also observed.;Two major conclusions are drawn. First, certain types of directives tend to be associated with certain moves and certain patterns of politeness strategies, which are institutionalised; -and, second, politeness can be assessed in terms of the quantity of strategies applied, as well as the types of strategies used. The more threatening the directives, more politeness modifiers and higher ranked strategies are used.