Negative politeness strategies in global web-based English corpus (GloWbE): a comparative analysis of British and Pakistani English

In this study, corpus-based analysis of negative-politeness strategies in different varieties of English with a special focus on Pakistani (PK) and British English (GB) has been done using the data from Global Web-based English Corpus. Focusing on eight prototype expressions: ‘Could you’, ‘Excuse me’, ‘I apologize’, ‘I was wondering if’, ‘I’m afraid’, ‘Please’, ‘Sorry’, and ‘Would you mind’, the researchers computed normalized frequencies per one million words for two sub-corpora, each comprising approximately 11 million tokens. To explore mitigation, that is, the potential social transgressions, the researchers conducted quantitative analysis. Overall, British English exhibits a higher total mitigation density (369.61 fpmw) compared to Pakistani English (333.30 fpmw), driven especially by more frequent use of the apologetic marker ‘Sorry’ and the request-softening frame ‘Could you’. Conversely, Pakistani English demonstrates significantly greater use of three markers: ‘I’m afraid’ (including its non-contracted form ‘I am afraid’), ‘I apologize’, and ‘Please’, reflecting South Asian cultural norms of expressing deference through regret, preemptive apology, and direct but polite appeals. Chi-square tests confirmed statistically significant cross-varietal differences for seven of the eight markers. The findings reveal that negative politeness strategies are systematically shaped by cultural norms, thus challenging the universality of Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory.