variation project paper [final]

POLITE REQUESTS, GENDER, ETHNICITY AND AGE

Polite Requests, Gender, Ethnicity and Age

Aiko Nakamura

I was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, and had an opportunity to live in the United

States for a few years, during which I acquired English. As a bilingual speaker of Japanese and

English who is more fluent in Japanese, I have struggled how to show politeness in the latter

language. Especially with the experience of working as a business person wearing a suit

everyday in Tokyo, the very strong importance and emphasis put on using correct polite forms

in Japanese has been intriguing for me. Prompted by these thoughts, I decided to see if ethnic

background influences the expression of politeness in English as well as gender as it is one of

the major focus when it comes to discussing politeness in language. When it comes to speech

acts in Japanese where politeness is invariably expressed, a service encounter is one of the

most prominent locations. Expecting the same, I chose a café as a site to observe speech acts in

English.

Then, the aim of this study narrowed down to examining the linguistic variation of

polite requests that customers make to employees when ordering at a coffee shop. The

independent variables were first gender (male or female) and ethnicity (Asian or Caucasian) of

customers. However, as I conducted observations, I realized that age played a significant role

in the choice of polite requests. Hence, I decided to include age (20s~30s, 40s~50s, 60s above)

of customers as another variable. The dependent variable is the manner of politeness when

making requests to employees. The results were striking in that there was no significant

difference with gender in the frequency of polite requests but there was with age. The theory of

performativity on gender was legitimized with this phenomenon. Ethnicity yielded an

interesting result that almost all Asian background customers used one form of polite request

while Caucasian background customers used more evenly on all forms. The Communication

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Accommodation Theory as well as different cultural norms of politeness and face threatening

acts seemed to attribute to the different frequency of polite requests by age and ethnicity.

Below, I will review previous studies pertaining to the correlations between gender

difference and politeness, and ethnicity difference and politeness. First, I will explain the major

concepts of politeness: face work, positive and negative politeness, and Face Threatening Acts/

Prime Face threatening Acts introducing a cross-cultural aspect. Then, I will discuss the

previous works on gender and politeness. Finally, I will discuss my aim for incorporating these

concepts to investigate on the speech acts between customers and employees at a coffee shop.

Politeness and Ethnicity

Goffman (2006) introduced the concept of face that it is “the positive social value a

person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular

contact”(p.299). People have their own positive face when interacting with others and by

nature they endeavor to maintain it by employing poise, that is, “the capacity to suppress and

conceal any tendency to become shamefaced during encounters with others” (Goffman, 2006,

p.300). It is the act innate in all social interactions during which people implement various

measures to act consistently with their face, which is called face-work. Goffman (2006) also

maintains that when it is explained what a person or culture is like, usually it is the repertoire

of such face-saving acts that people refer to, which partly underlines the different linguistic

discourses the customers show when interacting with employees at a café described by

different ethnic backgrounds.

In the course of face-work, there are two different kinds of face that people employ:

positive and negative face. Brown and Levinson (2006) indicate that positive face is used when

one desires to be accepted by others, whereas negative face is used when one desires to not be

impeded by others. Hence, positive politeness is when a speaker orients his/her wants toward

the hearer’s wants by treating the hearer as somebody close to you such as a member of the

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speaker’s community, a friend or a family. By contrast, negative politeness is when a speaker

orients toward a hearer’s wants to maintain his/her own territory and not be impeded by others.

When an employee asks a customer, “How are you doing today?” and a customer

replies, “Good, it’s such a good weather today, I had to take a walk to the Warf!,” the

employee is expressing positive politeness, and the customer is showing a positive face,

responding to the employee’s question by sharing his/her personal life. Conversely, if the

customer replies only “Good, how are you?” and the employee responses back, “Good, what

can I get you?,” it can be said that the customer has a negative face, responding politely to

complete a conventional adjacency pair of a greeting but not letting the employee intrude on

his/her personal realm, and the employee showing negative politeness to the customer by not

asking more.

Another crucial concept Brown and Levinson (2006) draw is the Face Threatening Acts

(FTAs), which are “certain kinds of acts [that] intrinsically threaten face, namely those acts that

by their nature run contrary to the face wants of the addressee and/or of the speaker” (p.313).

The acts that threaten a negative face are when a speaker does not avoid impeding a hearer’s

freedom of action such as orders, requests, suggestions, advice, remindings, threats, warnings,

dares, compliments, etc. The acts that threaten positive face are when a speaker does not care

about what a hearer wants or desires such as expressions of disapproval, criticism, contempt or

ridicule, contradictions or disagreements, challenges, etc. At a café, if an employee tells a

customer “How are you? Oh I love your nails!,” it can be said that the employee is threatening

the customer’s negative face by mentioning something that a hearer might not be touched

upon.

Pertaining to the notion of FTAs, Conlan (2005) came up with a term Primary Face

Threatening Acts (PFTAs) to refer to any “speech acts by means of which an overriding

pragmatic goal is attempted” (p.132). He agrees with Brown and Levinson that all speech acts

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involve a face-threatening activity but emphasizes that there are always FTAs to appropriately

prepare the way for, and mitigate the force of the weightier FTAs in the end, which is the

PFTA. From this point of view, the whole speech event can be broken into four different levels

labeled in order as: Opening Acts, Establishing Acts, Signalling Acts, and PFTA realization

(Conlan, 2005, p.135). Although the regular discourses between a customer and an employee at

a café to request for a drink does not usually take up the whole four levels of speech acts

because it is not face threatening for an employee to be ordered to make customers a coffee as

it is their duty, depending on their relationship a discourse as below can be analyzed with this

perspective.

When a customer orders a drink to an employee, he/she might say “Hi, how are you?,”

and an employee replies, “Good, thank you. What can I get you today?,” then the customer

finally orders, “Yes, I am feeling like getting something sweet today…,” the employee

responses, “well, we have all kinds of sweet lattes, or hot chocolate, if you’d like,” then the

customer finally requests, “Okay, can I get a caramel latte?” In this case, the first speech act of

the customer asking the employee, “How are you?” is an pre-FTA Opening Act, and when the

employee replies the question saying “Good, thank you,” and asks the customer what he/she

would like to get, they are pre-FTA Establishing Acts in which “the relative power and

distance values of the interaction are established” (Conlan, 2005, p.135). Then as the customer

utters, “Yes, I am feeling…,” and the employee suggests drinks, they are pre-FTA Signalling

Acts, in which the speaker, the customer is signaling that a PFTA is about to be performed, and

the hearer, the employee, is acknowledging it. Finally, the PFTA is realized by the customer

when a caramel latte is requested. It can be said that this final request of PFTA that the

customer makes to order a coffee is mitigated in its force by the preceding four levels of FTAs

compared to having none of them before the PFTA and the coffee is ordered abruptly. Conlan

maintains that this face-saving discourse management prior to the performance of PFTAs has

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been recognized by many researchers, notably in the realm of cross-cultural speech acts study.

As a matter of fact, one of his studies prove that Asian speakers of English tend to omit the

preceding FTAs, and directly perform PFTAs while the Western speakers tend not to.

Politeness and Gender

O’Barr and Atkins (2009) did an influential work investigating on “women’s language”

in court. This term was claimed by Robin Lakoff to indicate that women talk in a certain way

different from men characterized by such features as wider intonation contours, more hedging

and use of expressive forms like adjectives, and more attention to linguistic correctness, etc.

Lakoff (1998) maintains in his study that this particular language “submerges a woman’s

personal identity, by denying her the means of expressing herself strongly, on the one hand,

and encouraging expressions that suggest triviality in subject matter and uncertainty about it (p.

243). However, what O’Barr and Atkins (2009) found was that such style of speech is not

limited to women but is also spoken by the men of lower class as well, and that, conversely,

women of higher class speak in a certain style that men of higher class speak. Hence, they

rephrased “women’s language” as “powerless language” versus “powerful language”. In other

words, the ways in which one style of language is used over the other does not necessarily has

to do with gender, but more to do with social power. Cameron (2006) explains this

phenomenon by introducing the concepts of “identity and performativity” defined by Judith

Butler that people constitute their identity by performing gender. In other words, “’feminine’

and ‘masculine’ are not what we are, nor traits we have, but effects we produce by way of

particular things we do” (Cameron, 2006, p.420). Hence, what we usually consider as women’s

way of talking as in “women’s language” or men’s way of talking as in robust, competitive,

and reporting than rapporting, are only ‘performative’ models of masculine and feminine styles

of speech. It can be then said that depending on contexts and situations, people choose to

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perform gender differently, at times behaving in ways that are normally considered as the

‘other’ gender. (Cameron, 2006, p.421).

As far as the relationship between gender and politeness is concerned, Mills (2005)

claims that the notion of women being “nicer” than men must be challenged. She emphasizes

that how we acknowledge behaviors as “polite” or “impolite” is based on the stereotypes of

what is perceived to be gender-appropriate behavior (p.276). That is, stereotypically, it is said

that women are more indirect in requests, sympathetic, caring, and cooperative, where as men

are more direct, interruptive and competitive, and it is judged “impolite” whenever women act

in a “masculine” way. This may be applied to the situation at a café when a male customer

orders a drink more directly as “A coffee, please” may be judged as not impolite but if it were a

female customer judged as impolite, which attributes to the stereotypical perspectives held by

the society as a whole for gender-appropriate behaviors. Such stereotypes may be the reason

behind the distinct ways of ordering a drink depending on gender.

Speech Acts between Customers and Employees

The studies carried out on politeness and gender hint at the different manners in which

customers make orders at a café to employees. Some make a polite request with interrogatives

such as “May I have~,” or “Can I have~,” while some others use declaratives such as “I’ll

have~”, “I would like~”. Some very few even use imperatives such as just giving the name of

the drink or food that they want. My aim of this study is to see if what accounts for such

differences in manners of polite requests attribute to the difference in gender and ethnical

background, that is, largely speaking, whether a customer has an Asian background or

Caucasian background.

Pinto (2011) shed a light on how politeness at a service encounter is judged differently

depending on cultures as he notes that speakers from Anglo cultures in general, have the risk of

being considered as superficial or insincere because there is “the abundance of niceties

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employed in English [which] could be interpreted as insincere in that it suggests a level of

sentiment or emotional involvement that might appear excessive, at least from an outsider’s

perspective” (p. 216) that value directness versus indirectness as Americans do. My study will

thus investigate if face-work is implemented differently in the polite requests of the customers

based on the differing ethnic background.

Research Question

Based on the previous studies, and my personal experiences, I was curious to know if

women and men actually express politeness in a different manner on a daily basis at a casual

service encounter as a café ‘performing” their distinct gender roles. Also, if having an Asian or

Caucasian background generates distinct patterns of polite requests influenced by the different

norms for dealing with FTAs. In addition to these, I was also interested if the commonly said

social phenomenon regarding politeness with young people that they are becoming less polite

in public compared to the past can be proved by this research. Initially, I did not include age as

an independent variable, but as a matter of fact, the results showed the opposite trend, and as I

analyzed the data, I found the variable as significant as the other two variables. Hence, I

formed this study’s research question as the following: In what ways does the frequency of

polite requests by customers to clerks vary with gender, ethnicity and age?

Method

This study was conducted in a café called Plumes located at the center of downtown

Monterey, California. I chose this site as there was a good diversity of customers in terms of

gender, ethnicity, and age, and the employees there includes both male and female Asian and

Caucasian. The site was also very favorable as the background music was not too loud to hear

the speech acts that occurred around the cashier. I was able to make sure that I clearly heard

what employees and customers said by sitting right by the cashier as a customer, remaining as

a non-participant observer throughout the observation.

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Participants

I collected 38 tokens on individual customers, 12 of which were female, and 26

male. As my research focus was on the customers’ side, my count on tokens is based on the

number of customers, and the utterances of employees were recorded together for each token if

there were any. Invariably, there was one of the three employees, all of whom seemed to be in

their 20s, one female Asian, one male Asian, and one male Caucasian. The customers ranged

from early 20s to above 60s, the majority of whom seemed to be in their 20s ~30s. In terms of

ethnicity, about three fourth of the customers were Caucasians, and I was only able to collect

10 tokens on customers who seemed to have Asian backgrounds including East Asian, and

Southeast Asian. The ratio of gender was a little unbalanced as well: 26 males and 12 females.

I did not select customers to observe, but took notes on whoever that came during the few

hours of time that I spent at the site each time.

Materials and Procedures

With my initial research question focusing on the frequency of polite requests by

customers to employees depending on their gender and ethnicity, my independent variables

that I recorded during observation were gender, male or female and ethnicity, Asian or

Caucasian. In addition to the two variables, I recorded their age consisting of three levels,

20s~30s, 40s~50s, and 60s above, as well as time of day in case they had significant influence

to the speech event that I was observing. All the variables were recorded on both employees’

and customers’ sides. My dependent variable was manner of request whose variants were (a)

polite greeting with request, (b) polite direct request with no greeting, and (c) impolite order

(no request and no greeting). One token constituted of one adjacency pair between a customer

and an employee. Whenever an employee did not say anything, I only included the utterances

of customers. Thus, some tokens only constitute one utterance, which a customer produced.

The variant (a), polite greeting with requests (“p.greeting”) included utterances as “Hi, how are

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you? Can I have…”, whose requests with modals as can or would with an interrogative

greeting initiated by a customer. I did not count as a “p.greeting” when an interrogative

greeting was initiated by an employee first, and a customer only responded to the greeting not

returning the same interrogative greeting. The variant (b), polite direct requests (“p.direct”)

included utterances as “Can I have…” or “I would like to have…”, which are the variant (a)

without the interrogative greetings. The variant (c), impolite order (“impolite”) included

utterances as “I’ll just have…,” “Just…,” etc, which did not include any greeting nor requests

with modals. I only counted as a token when a customer greeted with, for example, “how are

you”, etc.

I ranked the variants in the order of politeness as (a) positive greeting, (b) polite direct

requests, and then (c) impolite order as marking the least politeness. This was done based on

the study conducted by Pinto (2011) whose findings indicated that in the U.S., it is considered

more polite when employees came to assist customers with a greeting first as it calls for a

rapport. As Pinto (2011) mentions in his study, “even within the confines of a highly routine

service encounter, many of the informants seem to appreciate attempts by the cashier to engage

in polite verbal interaction, the type of socially appropriate linguistic behavior” (p. 231).

Hence, part of my aim in this research is to see how this ranking based on the U.S. culture

yields distinct results depending on two different ethnicities: Asian or Caucasian.

Results

The chart below shows the breakdown list of the 38 tokens I collected defined by the

two independent variables, gender and ethnicity, which I included in my initial research

question, and age, which I found significant to the frequency in polite requests later.

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Tokens (38)

Gender Ethnicity Age

Female: 12 Caucasian: 27 20s~30s: 28

Male: 26 Asian: 10 40s~50s: 7

60s~: 3

The 38 tokens are customer base, and I decided not to analyze the variables on the employees

in this research as they did not seem to have a significant effect on the manner of polite

requests produced by the 38 customers. Also, neither the time of day resulted to have a critical

influence on the politeness of the customers, and thus I excluded it from the analysis as well.

Gender Differences

Figure 1 compares females and males in their use of polite requests. For female, the

majority used positive direct requests, very few used positive greeting requests, and less than

20% of them used impolite requests. For male, the numbers were slightly more balanced than

female but still most people used positive direct requests, and nearly 30% of them used

impolite request forms while close to 20% used positive greeting requests. I expected women

to utter more positive greeting requests as they ‘perform’ to build rapport with interlocutors

more than men. However, it seems that some of the conditions of this site did not extract a

typical ‘women’s language’ from the females. For both impolite and positive greeting requests,

men used them slightly more frequently, but as the number of tokens for male is more than

twice as large as those for female, I interpret the data as revealing that there is not so much

difference in the frequency of polite requests between the two genders.

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Figure 1: Manner of polite requests defined by gender

Male

Female

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80%

ImpolitePositive DirectPositive Greeting

To investigate further on the trend that both gender presented high frequency in positive

direct requests, I examined the age of the speakers who uttered the form. It turned out that for

female, 100% of them were in 20s~30s age group, and for male, 87% of them were in 20s~30s

age group. For the other two types of requests, the speakers were mainly in their 40s~50s, and

above 60s groups. This illustrates that the demographics of my tokens in terms of age being

that 74% of the customers were in the 20s~30s group attributed to the high frequency of

positive direct requests in my data. The analysis on the reason why this particular group chose

to use positive direct requests will be discussed later.

Ethnicity Differences

Figure 2.1 compares use of polite requests defined by ethnicity. Surprisingly, none of

the ten customers with Asian background used impolite requests, and the majority used

positive direct requests. Only one person used positive greeting request. On the other hand,

nearly 40% of the customers with Caucasian background used impolite requests, half of them

used positive direct requests, and close to 20% used positive greeting requests. The findings

were as I expected in that Asian background customers did not use impolite forms at all, and

very few produced positive greeting forms due to the conventionalized understanding that

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Asian cultures tend to put emphasis on expressing politeness, and yet positive greeting distracts

negative face too much. However, to my surprise, there was higher number of people with

Caucasian background than I expected that produced impolite requests. The results must be

analyzed in consideration with other variables as age, which I will come back later.

Figure 2.1: Manner of polite requests defined by ethnicity

Caucasian

Asian

0%10%

20%30%

40%50%

60%70%

80%90%

100%


As both ethnicities resulted in producing positive direct requests the most, I decided to

do a further analysis only among those who requested with positive directs. There were clearly

two types of positive direct request forms: one starting with a short greeting such as “Hi” and

the other without it directly starting with a request such as “Can I have~”. Figure 2.2

demonstrates the demographics between customers with Asian background and Caucasian

background who used positive direct requests based on whether they uttered a short greeting

before making a request or not. Very interestingly, close to 80% of the Asian background

customers uttered a short greeting before they made a polite request while the data shows that it

was only about less than a half of the participants among the Caucasian background customers

who uttered a short greeting before making a positive direct request.

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Figure 2.2: +/- "Hi" among "Positive Direct"s

(+)"Hi"

(-)"Hi"

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90%

AsianCaucasian

Age Differences

In addition to gender and ethnicity, I also analyzed frequency counts of polite requests

based on age, which is illustrated with Figure 3 below. Surprisingly, three customers, who

seemed to be in the age of above 60s all requested an order with impolite forms, two of which

only told an employee the name of the drink or food that they wanted, and one added “please”

at the end. Also with those in their 40s~50s, the most frequently used form, 60% of them, was

impolite, nearly 30% positive direct and 10% positive greeting. For the youngest group of

customers, the majority used positive direct requests, around 20% of them used positive

greeting, and very few used impolite. The results struck me as I expected younger age group to

yield impolite requests more frequently than the aged groups as it is often said as being the

trend in society. It seems that there is an influence of interlocutors that that customers were

talking to, who were employees also in their 20s~30s. I did not see any pattern between the

ethnicity of the employees and the type of request customers uttered, but certainly, the same

age group of the all three employees had influenced the young age group customers to build a

rapport with them and avoid any face threatening acts, while for the older age group of

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customers, using impolite requests did not turn out as a FTA as they were older than the

employees.

Figure 3: Manner of polite requests defined by age

20s~30s

40s~50s

60s~

0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 120%


Discussion

From the results, I found some interesting trends on the frequency of polite requests

defined by each variable. The first one is that gender does not have a strong correlation with

the frequency in the type of polite requests. Despite the fact that male customers uttered more

of positive greeting requests and impolite requests, it is very slightly, and what needs to be

noted more here is that for both gender, the majority used positive direct forms, and most of

them were in 20s~30s age group. As Holmes (1995) maintains that “men tend to value public,

referentially orientated talk, while women value and enjoy intimate, affectively orientated talk”

(p. 37), I expected more women to use positive greeting requests, but as a matter of fact, the

majority of women in 20s~30s age group used positive direct, and only one woman in 20s~30s

age group used a positive greeting. This supports Cameron (2006)’s assertion that the particular

type of speech inclined to be seen in women as Holmes (1995) claims is only a ‘performative’

model of feminine styles of speech.

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Another significant trend is that age as a variable showed a significant difference in the

type of polite requests used by the customers. With all the interlocutors consisting of 20s~30s

age group, and the majority of customers also consisting of 20s~30s age group, it seemed that

there was an act of convergence claimed by the theory of Communication Accommodation

Theory by Giles (2009). CAT explains a human behavior of trying to adjust one’s

communication in order to either diminish or develop social and communicative differences

between oneself and an interlocutor. Then, “convergence happens when interactants’

communication styles become more similar to another, perhaps in terms of choice of slang,

obscenities, grammatical structures, volume, pitch, hand movements, and so on” (Giles, 2009,

p. 279). In this research, it needs to be noted that not only for the customers, but also for the

employees, it was very occasional that they initiated a positive greeting. In this respect, there is

a high possibility that customers accommodated themselves to their speech act, and did not

produce positive greeting requests but only positive direct requests. What needs to be explained

next is the low use of impolite forms by the 20s~30s age group. While the two groups above

40s had a high frequency in the utterance of impolite forms, very few of the young aged group

used impolite forms. I analyze this phenomenon that the young age group of customers tried to

have a positive face towards the same aged employees.

Finally, a variable of ethnicity produced an interesting trend that the majority of Asian

background customers used positive direct requests while Caucasian background customers

yielded a more balanced frequency for all three variants. What needs to be discussed here now

is the concept of politeness. As I noted earlier, Pinto (2011) made it clear that for Americans, it

is more polite when an utterance is preceded with a greeting even if the greeting is a routine

behavior of employees at a service encounter. Thus, it makes sense that higher frequency in

positive greeting request was seen with Caucasian background customers. However, with

Asians cultures, as Conlan (2005)’s work indicated, Asian speakers tended to make a request

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directly, whereas White speakers tended to include some more layers of conversation before

they made a final request mitigating the force of the face threatening act. In fact, in many parts

of Asia, it is too face threatening to greet a stranger with “how are you” as there is more social

distance when encountering strangers in their cultures. As Leech (2007) explains,

just as cultures differ in standards as to the appropriate amount of interpersonal space

(…), politeness accords “psychological space,” and here also cultures possess

differential norms. Some cultures, all other things being equal, are high social distance

and thus high politeness cultures. (…) In cultures with high social distance norms,

interaction is laced with high amounts of negative politeness, for these tactics create and

invoke social distance. Japanese and other Asian cultures epitomize high social distance

interaction norms (p. 528).

Despite this negative politeness that Asian background customers expressed with using positive

direct requests, what is interesting is that close to 80% of them uttered a short greeting such as

“Hi” to before saying the positive direct requests when only half of the Caucasian background

uttered a short greeting. I analyzed this phenomenon that this short greeting “Hi” was a face-

saving speech act to remain in “good face” for Asian background customers within the

interaction with the employees. Maintaining “good face” assumes a high value in Asian

cultures, according to Morand (1996, p. 58). In sum, frequency of polite requests in three

variants varied significantly by the two different groups of ethnicities due to the distinct norms

of politeness and face threatening acts, which attribute to the varied fundamental cultural

values.

The research had some limitations in terms of the size of the participants, and an

unbalanced ratio of variables; a considerably low number of women, Asian background, and

above 40s age groups in the tokens must be addressed to achieve generalizability of the results.

In addition, it would be interesting to increase the number of tokens, and analyze the

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correlations of the employee’s utterances or characteristics with those of customers by making

sure that I observed equal length of time on each employee. As I was not able to figure out the

shifts of the employees this time, my observation day and time seemed to always overlap the

shift of a particular employee. Also, it would be interesting to conduct this research at multiple

sites, and include location as a variable. The single site I chose, Plumes, seemed to have many

customers who came to the place regularly, and knew the employees well, which was a

potential threat to the internal validity of the research. By having multiple sites, and increase in

the number of tokens, such a threat should be mitigated.

Conclusion

When customers come to a café and place an order, frequency of polite requests did not

vary with gender so much, but significantly with ethnicity and age. The socially understood

gender role in language was not presented in the speech events at Plumes, and instead

illustrated some significant acts from CAT. The majority of the customers, who were in their

20s~30s, converged with the employees who also seemed to be around the same age by using

positive direct requests showing their positive face towards them. Another interesting finding

was that the majority of the Asian background customers used positive direct requests, no

impolite requests and very few positive greeting requests. The fact that negative politeness is

highly valued in interactions in Asian cultures led to yield a high frequency of positive direct

requests, and very low frequency in the positive greeting requests. Despite this negative

politeness expressed with positive direct requests, their major use of a short greeting, “Hi”,

expressed their importance of maintaining “good face” in interactions. Nevertheless, the study

was very limited in the number of tokens and the unbalanced demographics in terms of all the

variables, gender, ethnicity and age. With these limitations addressed, it would be interesting

and yield more accurate results to investigate on the speech acts of both sides of the

interlocutors, and select several sites ensuring that there is a good diversity in the participants.

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variation project paper [final]

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