A Comparative Study of Certainty and Conventional Indirectness: Evidence from British English and Peninsular Spanish

This article presents the results of an exploratory empirical study into the perception of conventionally indirect requests in British English and Peninsular Spanish, given the high incidence of the pragmatic category over others in its encoding of politeness in both related and unrelated languages...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Applied linguistics 2005-03, Vol.26 (1), p.1-31
Main Authors: Márquez Reiter, Rosina, Rainey, Isobel, Fulcher, Glenn
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Comparative Analysis
Contrastive Linguistics
Cultural Differences
English
Great Britain
Interaction
Interviews
Language Patterns
Language use
Linguistics
Perception
Pragmatics
Questionnaires
Role Playing
Semiotics
Social norms
Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics and ethnolinguistics
Spain
Spanish
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This article presents the results of an exploratory empirical study into the perception of conventionally indirect requests in British English and Peninsular Spanish, given the high incidence of the pragmatic category over others in its encoding of politeness in both related and unrelated languages (cf. Blum-Kulka et al., 1989). More specifically, the article focuses on the similarities and differences between Britons and Spaniards with regard to the speaker's assumed expectations of compliance in choosing from the conventionally indirect spectrum. In other words, the focus is on how (un)certain the speaker was that the addressee would comply with the request when s/he chose a particular conventionally indirect request. The data for this study were collected via an open role play, post-performance interviews and questionnaires. The results obtained show that, in comparable situations, the Spaniards were generally more certain that the addressee would comply with the request than the Britons. It is argued that conventional indirectness appears to reflect different social meanings in English and Spanish and that such differences should be taken into account when analysing the realization patterns of pragmatic categories in language.
ISSN:0142-6001
1477-450X
DOI:10.1093/applin/amh018