Ignacio-Simon Vázquez Orta

A Contrastive Study of Politeness: Phenomena in England and Spain

Series B: Applied & Interdisciplinary Papers ISSN 1435-6473 Essen: LAUD 1995 (2nd ed. with divergent page numbering 2012) Paper No. 267

Universität Duisburg-Essen

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Ignacio-Simon Váquez Orta

University of Zaragoza

A Contrastive Study od Politeness: Phenomena in England and Spain

Copyright by the author Reproduced by LAUD 1995 (2nd ed. with divergent page numbering 2012) Linguistic Agency Series B University of Duisburg-Essen Applied & Interdisciplinary Papers FB Geisteswissenschaften Paper No. 267 Universitätsstr. 12 D- 45117 Essen

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Ignacio-Simon Váquez Orta

A Contrastive Study of Politeness: Phenomena in England and Spain

1. Politeness And Cross-Cultural Pragmatics

1.1. Introduction

Politeness is one aspect of language which can best exemplify the close bond between language and society. A verbal exchange is not only an exchange of information: it is also a social and personal interaction. Besides linguistic meaning, it also conveys social meaning, such as personal relationship, relative status, social formality and the speaker’s attitude towards the addressee.

In second language learning and in the use of a second language by linguistically competent second language speakers, we very often come across processes of serious miscommunication ("pragmatic failures"1) in native-nonnative interactions. A party may fail to convey his or her intentions due to a lack of pragmatic equivalence between expressions in two languages. This particularly applies to the expression of politeness, a concept which is culture-specific.

In the case of Spanish speakers learning English or speaking English to native speakers, pragmatic failures of this kind are very noticeable. They very often arise from lack of shared expectations in regard to the appropriateness of linguistic behavior in varying contexts. Speakers of both languages do not always share the social meaning carried by distinctive modes of communication. Politeness is a culture-specific nation in each language and its linguistic expression is noticeably different in English and Spanish. Our interest here is to look at the kind of trouble Spanish native speakers of English get into when they do not understand or otherwise disregard a rule of use in English concerning the expression of politeness.

There are two general levels on which research into cross-cultural, inter-linguistic politeness may be carried out. The first level is

"the general, pragmatic, sociological or 'academic' level, on which research could be carried out for the interest inherent in acquiring an understanding of how people relate to one another in two partly similar and partly different societies. The second level involves practical research for pedagogical purposes" (Hickey, 1991c: 6).

This project sets out to investigate the Pragmatics of politeness in English and Spanish. It tries to do so at the first level mentioned above: the theoretical one. It is concerned with intra-language and inter-language (cultural) variability in the realization patterns of a speech act, request. The goals of the project are to compare across both languages the realization 1 This concept is explored in more detail in section 1.8.2.

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patterns of this speech act, and to establish the similarities and differences between native speakers' realization patterns in this act In each of the languages studied.

Although I have not followed any specific theoretical framework or school of thought, I have relied heavily on the work of politeness developed by Brown and Levinson (1978), (1987), exploring mainly their distinction between "positive" and "negative" politeness. My main hypothesis is that the difference between the Spanish and English systems of politeness is that of positive and negative politeness systems respectively.

Special emphasis is laid on the analysis of a speech act, request, because it presents special problems for Spanish-speaking people. Both requesting constructions and their modifications clearly indicate that a different kind of politeness is prevalent in the two societies.

My data come from a variety of sources, including discourse completion tests, role-playing exercises and material collected from participant and non-participant observation.

1.2. Universality in Language Pragmatics

One of the basic challenges for research in pragmatics is the issue of universality: to what extent is it possible to determine the degree to which the rules and principles that govern the use of language in context vary from culture to culture and from language to language? Answers to this question have to be sought through cross-cultural research pragmatics. For applied linguists, especially for those concerned with communicative language learning and teaching, cross-cultural research in pragmatics is essential in coping with the applied aspect of the issue of universality: to what extent is it possible to specify the particular pragmatic rules of use of a given language, rules which second language learners will have to acquire in order to attain successful communication in the target language?

The issue of universality is especially relevant in the context of speech act studies. A number of studies have established empirically (Cohen and Olshtain 1981; Kasper 1981; Blum-Kulka 1982; Thomas 1983) that second language speakers may fail to communicate effectively, even when they have a good grammatical and lexical command of the target language.

These second language speakers' pragmatic failures have been shown to be traceable, in part, to cross-linguistic differences in speech act realization rules in the languages involved, indicating that learners are just liable to transfer rules of use (having to do with contextual appropriacy) as those of usage (related to grammatical accuracy).

The distinction between Pragmalinguistics and Sociopragmatics introduced by Leech (1983:10-11), and later appropriated by Thomas (1983) in order to explain her theory of pragmatic failure, will be used here.

Leech distinguishes between “pragmalinguistic”, the linguistic end of pragmatics, which refers to the particular resources that a given language provides for conveying particular illocutions", and "sociopragmatics", the sociological interlace of pragmatics,

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which studies the ways in which pragmatic performance is subject to specific social conditions.

Variation in the USA of speech acts may be subject to the affect of social parameters, as is the case with all variation in linguistic behavior. We will be studying a number of situational variables, such as degree of social distance and power between participants, degree of imposition carried out by the speech act in question, etc.

A speaker's "linguistic competence" is made up of grammatical competence (abstract knowledge of intonation, phonology, syntax, semantic, etc.) and pragmatic competence (the ability to use language effectively in order to achieve a specific purpose and to understand language in context); this parallels Leech's division of linguistics into grammar and "pragmatics". Leech suggests that the semantics/pragmatics distinction can be equated, at least in part, with the distinction between "sentence meaning" and "speaker meaning". The notion of "communicative competence" would encompass both the grammatical and pragmatic competence.

1.3. Elements For A Taxonomy Of Communicative Competence

In setting up a taxonomy of communicative competence based on a functional criterion, it is necessary to consider first whether the kind of requirement the language user must cope with belong to different "modes of meaning" (Halliday 1978). The question is whether we need to speak of a general communicative competence which is acquired as a whole by the child in his/her process of becoming a social being, or whether it might be better to speak of an acquired pragmatic knowledge of language use which is added to the grammatical knowledge, the basic structures of which are innate.

In spite of the two different perspectives on language acquisition mentioned in the previous paragraph, it is necessary to say that describing and explaining verbal interaction is not the same as accounting for the way language is acquired. The taxonomy of communicative competence presented in this paper does not attempt to explain the process of language learning. The approach that is presented here is based on a modular conception of communicative competence which views talk as the product of a combination of different units belonging to different modes of meaning.

"Communicative competence" according to Canale and Swain (1980) and Canale (1983) consists of the following components:

a) grammatical competence

b) sociolinguistic competence2

2 The sociolinguistic competence consists of a) sociocultural rules, that specify ways of using language

appropriately in a given situation; they are concerned with style, register, degree of politeness and so on; b) rules of discourse, which concern the combining of language structures to produce unified texts in different modes; for example, a political speech, an academic paper, a cookery recipe... The focus here is on certain cohesion devices and coherence rules (appropriate combination of different functions) to organize the forms and meanings.

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c) discourse competence

d) strategic competence3.

Sociolinguistic competence is defined as the kind of knowledge and skills necessary to produce and understand utterances appropriately (both in form and in content) in different sociolinguistic contexts depending on the contextual factors mentioned in ethnographic studies: genre, topic, purpose, setting, participants, message form, message content, act sequence, norms for interaction and norms for interpretation. It is concerned with style, register, degree of politeness and so on. We are concerned in this paper precisely with this fundamental component of sociolinguistic competence, politeness, using mainly Brown and Levinson's model of politeness strategies.

Politeness has been the focus of several studies of the speech of native and non-native speakers of English. There are a number of reasons why learners of English who have not achieved native-like fluency could be expected to have difficulty in communicative interactions (Canale and Swain 1989). First, they may have only partial control over limited types of grammatical structures. In addition, they may lack the discourse competence which would enable them to utter long and complex passages of text coherently and cohesively. Finally, even with a flawless control of English grammar, a learner who does not have well-developed sociolinguistic competence runs the risk of offending other speakers by violating rules of social interaction.

Current treatments of politeness assume a universal set of human "face wants": people have "positive face" - they want to be liked, understood, admired, etc.- and "negative face"- they do not want to be impeded by others. It is generally in everyone's interests that face should be protected. Politeness is seen in terms of sets of strategies on the part of the discourse participants for mitigating speech acts which are potentially threatening to their own "face" or that of an interlocutor. This account is typical of pragmatics in seeing language use as shaped by the intentions of the individuals.

1.4. Cross-Cultural Factors Influencing Intelligibility "Most of our misunderstandings of other people are not due to any inability to hear them or to parse their sentences or to understand their words ... A far more important source of difficulty in communication is that we so often fail to understand a speaker's intention" (Miller 1974)

The intelligibility of a speaker's variety of English to a speaker of another variety does not alone guarantee that the messages contained within the former's utterances will be communicated effectively to the latter. Communication problems are all the more likely to

3 The discrete consideration of each of the components should not be understood as a model of how

language is acquired, which is not the same as how language should be described. The modular approach responds rather to an analysis of the needs of language learners based on the results of tests of communicative competence.

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arise if the two speakers come from different cultural backgrounds. For different cultures do not necessarily coincide in their methods of communicating appropriately, so that the possession of communicative competence in one culture does not ensure the ability to produce or process information appropriately in another.

Nelson cites various authorities (Hymes, Labov, Paulson, etc.) in support of his view that "language as a communication system cannot be divorced from its social functioning". He stresses the importance of "familiarity with cultural and situational context", arguing that "a meaningful definition of 'being intelligible' would have to include purely linguistic and social aspects of competence. In the context of situation, inappropriateness can stem from any of the various levels of the linguistic and participant-background context, to the detriment of effective communication" (1983: 64).

Hymes (1972), in discussing communicative competence and sociolinguistic interference between languages, points out that the degree 01 linguistic similarity or distance between two languages cannot predict their mutual intelligibility. Saville-Troike states that "shared cultural knowledge is essential to explain the shared presuppositions and judgements of truth value which are the essential undergirdings of language structures, as well as of contextually appropriate usage and interpretation" (1989: 22).

Milroy (1984), in her comparison of comprehension in natural as opposed to experimental settings, claims, citing Smith and Wilson (1979), that "context and shared background knowledge assist Interlocutors in interpreting utterances".

Gumperz refers frequently to communication problems caused by non-shared features of cultural background (Gumperz 1977, 1982, 1983, Gumperz and Tannen 1979 Gumperz et al. 1979).

The literature identifies two major areas in which cross-cultural "social" factors may adversely affect the intelligibility of contextualised oral discourse. The first area lies within the domain of pragmatics. Relevant to the present discussion are cross-cultural systems of politeness and the ways speech acts are used and understood in different cultures. The second area is one of the concerns of discourse analysis, namely the management of conversation with respect to cultural background. Before moving on to a discussion of cross-cultural differences and the ways in which they impede communication, the evidence for cross-cultural universals will be examined.

1.5. Cross-Cultural Universality In Language Use: Politeness Systems

The issue of universality we have mentioned is especially relevant in the context of speech act studies. A number of studies have established empirically that second language speakers might fail to communicate effectively (commit pragmatic failures), even when they have an excellent grammatical and lexical command of the target language.

Speech acts have been claimed by some (Austin 1962; Searle, 1969, 1975) to operate by universal pragmatic principles, and claimed by others to vary in conceptualization and

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verbalization across cultures and languages (Green 1975; Wierzbicka, 1985). Their modes of performance carry heavy social implications and seem to be ruled by universal principles of cooperation and politeness (Brown and Levinson 1978, 1987; Leech, 1983). And yet, cultures have been shown to vary drastically in their interactional styles, leading to different preferences for modes of speech act behavior.

Searle systematized Austin's work and introduced a distinction between direct and indirect speech acts, which is based on the recognition of the intended perlocutionary effect of an utterance in situation. Indirect speech acts are cases in which one illocutionary act is performed indirectly by way of performing another" (1975: 60). Thus the following example can be seen as a question about the hearer’s ability but, at another level, a request for action: Can you speak a bit louder, please?

A sentence such as this, though interrogative in form, is conventionally used to make a request.

The notion of "indirect speech acts" only makes sense if one subscribes to the notion of literal force, i.e., to the view that illocutionary force is built into sentence form (literal force hypothesis).

The literal force hypothesis is confronted with a two-pronged problem: on the one hand, it seems to make the wrong predictions about the assignment of force to sentence form, and on the other it needs to provide an account of how and why sentences seem able to bear the syntactic stigmata, or distributional markers, of their indirect forces.

"The problem posed by indirect speech acts is the problem of how it is possible for the speaker to say one thing and mean that but also something else... a large part of that problem is that of how it is possible for the hearer to understand the indirect speech act when the sentence he hears and understand means something else" (Searle).

This is where Grice and his Cooperative principle come in. On the basis of that principle, Grice explains that conversation is lull of implicatures, that is, it implicates or implies more than is said; in saying one thing, a person is often understood to be implying something else, either extra to or different from the literal meaning or force. This occurs in a natural way unless the hearer has some reason to think that the speaker is failing to fulfill one of the maxims, for example, by violating it, by making it plain that he is opting out of it, by openly flouting it or by being unable to fulfill it because it conflicts with some other maxim as for example when he cannot give complete information (quantity) because he has little evidence (quality).

Grice gives the example: asked to write a reference for a candidate for a philosophy job, someone writes: "Dear Sir, Mr. X's command of English is excellent, and his attendance at tutorials has been regular. Yours sincerely".

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Others, like Sperber and Wilson (1986), stress the role of general pragmatic principles (following Grice 1975), notably the principle of relevance, to account for the process by which indirect meanings are encoded and decoded in context. But it is entirely an empirical matter what forms of indirectness are used in any given language for the performance of a specific speech act. Our project approaches the issue from this empirical perspective.

The view adopted here with regard to speech act theory follows Bierwisch (1980) in anchoring the study of speech acts strongly in the area of linguistic communication. Our claim is that there is a strong need to complement theoretical studies of speech acts with empirical studies based on speech acts produced by native speakers in context.

Politeness in language has been a major concern of Anglo-American pragmatics in the 1970s and 1980s. Although there exists a vast body of literature documenting cross-cultural differences, some researchers have preferred to focus on universals, and have produced both evidence and theories in support of the existence of such, predominantly in the field of politeness. The main proponents of theories of cross-cultural, politeness universals are Grice, Lakoff, Leech as well as Brown and Levinson.

However, even those who argue in favor of the greater effect of cross-cultural differences acknowledge the existence of universals. Wolfson (1983), for example, points out that all languages use address forms. Ferguson (1976) suggests that all languages make use of "politeness formulas" and that politeness itself is probably universal.

1. 5. 1. Conversational Principles (1): co-operation The idea that conversation proceeds according to a principle, known and applied by all human beings, was first proposed in a limited form by the philosopher Paul Grice (1975), who put forward what was described as the co-operative principle.

According to this principle, we interpret language on the assumption that its user is obeying lour maxims. We assume he or she is intending to:

- tell the truth (maxim of quality)

- be brief (maxim of quantity)

- be relevant (maxim of relevance)

- be clear (maxim of manner).

Using these assumptions, combined with general knowledge of the world, the receiver can reason from the literal, semantic meaning of what is said to the pragmatic meaning- and induce what the sender is intending to do with his or her words.

When we talk about people following the co-operative principle, this does not mean that they can consciously and explicitly formulate it to themselves. It means rather that people act as though they know the principle, just as they act as though they know the rules

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of grammar- though very few people can even begin to formulate them, and nobody can formulate them completely.

Sometimes it is very easy to obey all four maxims at once; but there are cases when the demands of the four maxims do not fit so happily together. II somebody asks you: "What does your job involve?", it is difficult to obey both the quality and quantity maxim. Brevity and truth often pull in opposite directions.

Some types of discourse often sacrifice the maxim of quantity to the maxim of quality (e.g. legal discourse and scientific discourse). The maxims of quantity and manner are often at odds too. To be clear one sometimes needs to be long-winded.

1.5.1.1 Flouting the cooperative principle There are also times when meaning derives from deliberate violations of the cooperative principle, always provided that the sender intends the receiver to perceive them as such, and that this is how, in fact, the receiver does perceive them. If the sender does not intend violations of the principle to be perceived as such, or if the receiver does not realize that they are deliberate, then communication degenerates into lying, or simply breaks down altogether.

If I tell you: I’ve got millions of wine bottles in my cellar,

though it is literally false, you will perceive that remark as a figure of speech, hyperbole, a way of making my point more forcefully.

The same holds for metaphor. Margaret Thatcher was an iron lady. Note the importance of the sender's correct estimation of the receiver's state of knowledge. The figures of speech work only if the sender has enough knowledge to know that average cellars will not hold millions of bottles or that women are not made of iron.

When we speak to a child or to someone from a different culture, we can easily estimate this knowledge incorrectly. Children and learners of foreign languages take figures of speech literally. Through our misunderstanding of their knowledge, a metaphor can become a lie, and we are left with the disturbing conclusion that the truth of a message is something constructed by sender and receiver, and not only a quality of the sender's intention or the message itself.

Just as the quality maxim can be flouted for effect, so can the other three. The quantity maxim is violated in both directions: creating prolixity if we say too much and terseness if we are too brief. We often say more than we need, perhaps to mark a sense of occasion or respect; and we often say less than we need, perhaps to be rude, or blunt, or forthright.

The meanings created by these floutings are often social, signaling the attitude of the sender to the receiver of the message, and the kind of relationship which exists or is developing between them. Grice viewed these attitudinal meanings as being created by departures from the co-operative principle.

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1.5.1.2. Grice's general theory of conversational implicature He tries to assimilate indirect speech acts to a broad range of other phenomena that include metaphor, irony and all other cases where speaker's intent and sentence-meaning are seriously at variance. Such a proposal has the great advantage of promising to explain indirect speech acts that are not directly based on felicity conditions. It then becomes necessary, however, to explain why those indirect speech acts based on felicity conditions are so prevalent and successful, and this Grice fails to do satisfactorily.

Incidentally, his inference approach fails to attend to the motivation for indirect speech acts: why, for example, do speakers so often prefer the contortions of

1. I don't suppose that you would by any chance be able to lend me a fiver, would you?

to the simplicity and directness of

2. Please lend me a fiver

Attempts to explain the rationale behind the interactional pessimism in 1 appeal to the systematic pressures of strategies of politeness (Brown and Levinson, 1987; Lakoff, 1973; Leech, 1977 and 1983). Brown and Levinson (1978), for instance, suggest that the social rationale of indirectness is based on universal principles. By deviating from the simple and direct form 2, one can communicate by conversational implicature that these omnipresent considerations of politeness are being taken into consideration in performing the relevant speech act.

1.5.2 Conversational Principles (2): politeness An alternative way of looking at this is to posit another principle also universally present in human intercourse. The politeness principle may also be formulated as a series of maxims which people assume are being followed in the utterances of others. As with the co-operative principle any flouting of these maxims will take on meaning, provided it is perceived for what it is. Grice also maintained that “be polite” is yet another maxim participants observe in interactions, and although he does not expand on this issue of politeness, he has provided a strong incentive for others to do so.

1.5.2.1 The rules of politeness The linguist Bobin Lakoff (1973) expanded on Grice's views in her attempt to account for politeness phenomena. Unlike Grice, she begins by considering the inadequacy of grammars based only on grammatical rules and argues that some kind of pragmatic rules should also be incorporated. Such rules would enable us to detect and determine deviant utterances which pose neither syntactic nor semantic problems. She proposes the following two basic rules which she calls rules of pragmatic competence:

1. Be clear

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2. Be polite.

As Lakoff says, if the main concern is the message to be communicated, the speaker will concentrate on the clarity of the utterance; whereas, if consideration of the status of the interlocutors and/or the situation is involved, then the main concern will be the expressions of politeness.

Lakoff argues4 that all Grice's conversational postulates fall under her rule 1 (be clear) expressed as "we are lucky in our work that the rules of clarity have been formulated ... in Grice’s work". Lakoff further argues that communication would be boring and extremely formal strictly adhering to such postulates, and consequently they are violated in everyday interactions.

Lakoff's second pragmatic rule (be polite) comprises three rules of politeness as follows:

- don't impose

- give options

- make your receiver feel good .

Lakoff (1975; 65) subsequently reformulates, or rather rephrases, the rules of politeness as follows:

1. Formality: keep aloof.

2. Deference: give options.

3. Camaraderie: show sympathy.

Brown and Levinson (1978: 287), in their discussions of the advantages of analysing in terms of strategies rather than in terms of rules, maintain that although a "rule-based analysis works very well for well-bounded ritualized speech events like greetings", it appears problematic with less ritualized episodes. Elsewhere, Brown (1976: 246) contends Lakoff's definition of politeness is very rigid, and that this is its major weakness.

1.5.2.2 The Maxims of Politeness Geoffrey Leech (1983) considers the Politeness Principle in his Interpersonal Rhetoric. For Leech Grice's Cooperative principle is just one component of his interpersonal rhetoric. With that he tries to explain the relation between sense and force in human communication.

Rhetoric is the study of effective use of communication, in a goal-oriented speech situation, in which S uses language in order to produce a particular effect in the mind of H.5

4 (ibid. 297) 5 According to Leech, the interpersonal Rhetoric imposes “input constraints” upon the message and “output constraints” on the grammar.

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Rhetorical principles socially constrain communicative behavior in various ways, but they do not provide the main motivation for talking, except in the case of "purely social" utterances such as greetings and thanks.

There are a number of maxims dealing with polite behavior. Before describing them, we shall note that politeness concerns a relationship between two participants whom we may call self and other. In conversation self will normally be identified with s, and other with h.; but speakers also show politeness to third parties, who may or may not be present in the speech situation.

The maxims of the PP tend to go in pairs as follows6: a) Maxim of Tact (in impositives and commissives) :a)

Minimize cost to other, maximize benefit to other).

b) Maxim of generosity (in impositives and commissives) :a) Minimize benefit to selt, maximize cost to self).

c) Maxim of Approbation (in expressives and assertives): Minimize dispraise of other, maximize praise of other).

d) Maxim of Modesty (in expressives and assertives): Minimize praise of self, maximize dispraise of self).

e) Agreement maxim:(in assertives) Minimize disagreement between self and other, maximize agreement between self and other.

f) Sympathy maxim: (in assertives) Minimize antipathy between self and other, maximize sympathy between self and other.

Leech says that in communication, Grice's cooperative principle interacts with his proposed politeness principle. Similar to Grice and Lakoff, Leech claims that his maxims hold for both verbal and non-verbal behavior. He justifies the need for the politeness principle as a necessary complement, not just an addition to the cooperative principle, by discussing apparent exceptions which cannot be handled satisfactorily solely in terms of the cooperative principle.

In line with both Grice and Lakoff, he recognizes the possibility of conflict between the cooperative and politeness principle. When a tension between them arises, participants are faced with a dilemma as to which to sacrifice. By sacrificing the politeness principle, one risks the equilibrium of peaceful and harmonious human relationships, which is a necessary prerequisite for cooperative behavior, thus further justifying the complementarity of the two principles. Brown and Levinson (1987: 50), however, argue that Grice's cooperative principle and Leech’s politeness principle have different status mainly on the

6 Leech, G. (1983: 16).

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grounds that no violation of Grice's maxims occurs without a reason, whereas Leech's politeness maxims constitute such reasons for violations.

Leech elaborates further on his maxims and suggests that there are pragmatic scales associated with them. He identifies three such scales which have "a bearing on the degree of tact appropriate to a given speech situation" (1983: 123).

1. The cost/benefit scale which specifies how much the proposed action is judged by the speaker to be of cost or benefit to the speaker or to the addressee.

2. The optionality scale which specifies to what extent the proposed action is at the choice of the addressee.

3. The indirectness scale which specifies how much inference is involved in the proposed action.

The first four maxims of the PP tend to go in pairs because they deal with bipolar scales: the cost-benefit and praise-dispraise scales. The other two maxims deal with unipolar scales: the scales of agreement and sympathy.

Besides these pragmatic scales, there are another two which are relevant to politeness: “authority” and “social distance”, which are roughly equivalent to "power" and "solidarity" respectively, as proposed by Brown and Gilman (1960)

We should bear in mind that these maxims are observed "up to a certain point" rather than as absolute rules. Leech proposes an interesting distinction between "absolute" and "relative" politeness. The former can be analysed as a scale with a positive and a negative pole in that some acts are intrinsically polite (e.g. offers) and some others intrinsically impolite (e.g. orders). Within this framework, negative politeness is viewed as minimizing the impoliteness of impolite illocutions, and positive politeness as maximising the politeness of polite illocutions. Relative politeness depends on the context and the situation, because it is clear that that the "Co-operative Principle and the Politeness Principle operate variably in different cultures or language communities, in different social situations, among different social classes, etc." (Leech 1983: 83).

1.5.3 Politeness and strategic interaction The strongest case for cross-cultural universals is made by Brown and Levinson (1987), the reissue of a paper first published in 1978. Because of the definitive nature of their work and the wide response it has elicited from other sociolinguists and discourse analysts, their theoretical framework will now be described and discussed in detail.

Brown and Levinson's starling point is "the extraordinary parallelism in the linguistic minutiae of the utterances with which persons choose to express themselves in quite unrelated languages and cultures".

Their main aim is to describe and account for this parallelism, and they set about achieving it by providing evidence from three unrelated languages (British and American

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English, Tamil and Tzeltal- the language spoken by Mayan Indians in Chiapas, Mexico), and hence proposing a theory of politeness in which specific linguistic devices universally form the realizations of underlying politeness strategies.

In order to account for the systematic aspects that they have observed in language use, Brown and Levinson construct a Model Person (MP). An MP, we are told, consists of a fluent speaker of a natural language who is endowed with the properties of rationality (the ability to reason from ends to the means that will achieve them) and face.

1.5.3.1 The principle of rationality Their starting point is the principle of rationality, reading: "Given a desired end, one is to choose that action which most effectively, and at least cost, attains that end, other things being equal" (Asa Kasher: 109). The rationality principle instructs us to opt for that course of action which leads to the given end most effectively, at least cost. Indeed, arguments with respect to the rationality of some course or courses of action should rest on considerations of both types:

-which way is the most effective, other things being equal, and

-which way requires the least effort, other things being equal.

Notice that when there is no reason to assume the contrary, persons are taken to be rational agents. This is a major presumption. Ends, values and beliefs, in a given context of action, are assumed to offer sufficient grounds for a satisfactory justification of behavior, unless there is some compelling counter evidence. The presumption of rationality plays a major role, both in daily understanding of human intentional activity, and in its theoretical explanation.

According to the present view, a rational reconstruction of an intentional action, of a certain person in a certain context, should identify the end or ends which the person tries to attain at that context by performing the action under consideration. However, such a rational reconstruction would be utterly incomplete, as long as it fails to identify a scale of values in reference to which that person's action is deemed preferable to alternative courses of action.

When speech acts are under consideration, rational reconstruction is, actually, a theoretical part of articulate understanding. Such understanding is gained only through the identification of the ends intended to be attained by putting to use appropriate linguistic means and the identification of a scale of values in reference to which some of the means are regarded better than others, under the circumstances.

Similar conditions are required from the speaker's point of view. A rational justification of one's own speech act will also include an identification of the ends and seeks to attain by performing an appropriate speech act as well as an identification of a scale of values in reference to which some speech acts are considered to be, under the circumstances, more suitable than others, other things being equal.

Indeed, reconstruction and justification are two sides of the same coin of rationality.

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Brown and Levinson's view of politeness is directly related to the present notion of rationality. Politeness in speech acts is a matter of their cost, as determined by certain scales of values. An ordinary speech act is presumably rational and as such its justification and reconstruction involves considerations as to which course of action would be of the least cost, from certain points of view. One such point of view, or cluster of points of view, is politeness. Another is time.

The seeming clash between politeness maxims and conversational maxims is a tension within rationality itself, that is to say, between different considerations related to rational actions. For certain types of ends and values, there seems to exist a negative correlation between attaining one's ends most effectively and attaining them at least cost. Under many ordinary circumstances, the more an action is effective, the more it costs. Concentrating upon cost might mean diminishing effectiveness; concentrating upon effects might be tantamount to increased costs. For instance, the more informative one is, under certain circumstances, the more impolite one's action becomes.

Given such a natural tension within rationality, a problem arises, which we take to be the main problem of rationality theories of discourse politeness: what determines, in our rational uses of language, the equilibrium points of effectiveness and costs? For instance, what makes us, in a given context of utterance, use one of the following sentences rather than another:

- Open the door, please.

- I would like you to open the door.

- Will you open the door?

- Can you open the door?

- Would you mind opening the door?

- Could you open the door?

A first step towards a solution of the problem suggests itself. It is reasonable to assume that several thresholds are applied in each context of utterance. Some expressions are from the list of alternatives because they are of limited effectiveness. Similarly, other expressions are dropped from list of alternatives because they cost too much in terms of politeness. Usually, the application of those thresholds of and cost to one's ends at a given context of utterance does not reduce the list of possible expressions to a single item, but it gives you the right range of options.

1.5.3.2 The notion of “face” The concept of "face" is central to Brown and Levinson's theory. Their interpretation of the term derives both from Goffman (1967) and from the English folk terms "losing face" (being humiliated) and "saving lace" (being saved from humiliation). Brown and Levinson claim that face is made up of two constituents: positive face and negative face. Broadly

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speaking, a person's positive face consists of the desire to be approved of, and her negative face, the desire not to be imposed upon. The authors consider that since everyone is vulnerable to face-loss, it is in the mutual interest of participants in conversation to maintain one another's face, and the motivation to do so is seen as underlying orderly communication.

However, certain acts such, as requests, criticisms and complaints, intrinsically threaten face. The authors refer to such acts as "face threatening acts".

The seriousness of such acts can be assessed according to three variables: the social distance (D)

the relative power (P) of speaker and hearer

the ranking of impositions (R) within a particular culture.

The actual strategy7 used is selected from a scale of five options, which range from:

1. "bald on record" (with no redressive action, thus conforming to Grice's Cooperative principle): "Shut the window!".

2. Positive politeness: "Shut the window, luv"

3. Negative politeness: "I wonder if you mind shutting the window" (using conventional indirectness)

4. "off the record": "It's cold in here" (using non-conventional indirectness).

5. "don't do the FTA".

At the two extremes (i.e. 1 and 5) politeness is rather irrelevant. Their first category of strategies is what they call “bald on record”, which is employed when there is no risk involved. Redressive action is not necessary because such strategies are either performed by interactants who are on intimate terms or because other demands for efficiency override face concerns. The second and third categories ("positive" and "negative" politeness strategies respectively) involve redressive action and attempt to satisfy the addressee's positive or negative face wants. These two sets of strategies include the majority of linguistic devices used in everyday interactions. Their fourth category of politeness strategies is called "off record". This means that the utterance used is ambiguous (formulated as a hint, for instance), and its interpretation is left to the addressee, because the risk of loss of face is great. Their fifth category includes those cases in which nothing is said because the risk is prohibitely great.

7 Brown and Levinson criticize the characterization of behaviours described in speech act theory as

“norms” and “rules”, and suggest that an approach emphasizing “strategies” can better characterize the dynamism of speech acts. Yet while their objections to the static to the static characterization of discourse in some analysis are warranted, the strategies they propose resemble rules.

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The positive/negative politeness distinction is closely related to two of the main forms inherent in Goffman (1956: 481) "deference" and "presentational rituals". Showing involvement and keeping distance present the two main ways of being polite to other people.

The bulk of the work is taken up with a detailed description of specific realizations of these live sets of categories, using examples from the three unrelated languages referred to above.

Fasold considers a strength of Brown and Levinson's approach towards politeness to be their attempt to "explain politeness by deriving it from more fundamental notions of what it is to be a human being (being rational and having face wants)" (1990: 161). He compares their approach favorably with those of Lakoff and Leech, who take sets of rules as their starting points (Lakoff's rules of politeness, Leech's maxims of the Politeness Principle) and explain politeness phenomena in terms of them, but do not explain why such rules should exist in the first place.

Several authors and reviewers have commented on the usefulness of various aspects of Brown and Levinson's original framework; for example, Ferguson (1976), Lavandera (1987), Sifianou (1987), Havertake (1988) and Hickey (1991a, 1991b).

Scollon and Scollon (1983: 170) state that "Brown and Levinson's insight has been to provide us with a theoretical framework within which we can discuss the face relations between speakers as a matter of deep assumptions about the relationship that are encoded in the politeness strategies of deference and solidarity".

Hill et al. (1986) claim that their findings (in the comparison of Japanese and American requests for a pen) lend empirical support to Brown and Levinson's hypothesis that social distance and power are two major criteria in any politeness system, and that the weighting assigned to each will vary cross-culturally.

1. 6. Cross-Cultural Diversity In Language Use

Although such theories of the universality of language use clearly contain a certain degree of truth, many sociolinguists have expressed reservations. Saville-Troike (1982) suggests that while many functions of language are indeed universal, the way language operates in any one society to serve these functions is culture-specific.

Loveday (1982) says much the same in his observation that cross-cultural differences reside not in what we do, but in how we do it. Like others, such as Varonis (1981), Schmidt and Richards (1985), Fasold (1990), Odlin (1990), he stresses the part played by cross-cultural transfer, for example in the ways ritual formulae are used.

1.6.1. Different Systems of Politeness Most of those who disagree with theories of politeness systems focus their arguments on the work of Brown and Levinson (1987) since this is the most comprehensive statement of the universal case.

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Criticisms of Brown and Levinson's theory focus on four main areas:

1. the absense of context (both situational and cultural)

2. the neglect of discourse

3. the rigidity of the politeness scale in relation to the three sociological variables (P, D, and R).

4. the universality of their ranking of negative politeness and off-record strategies.

1.6.1.1. The absence of context The context of a politeness strategy may be defined both as the immediate situation in which it occurs and as the wider cultural setting. Neither of these is embraced by Brown and Levinson's politeness model. Language generally has a social setting, and it is thus of paramount importance in any evaluation of meaning to know who is speaking to whom and where the conversation is taking place. Situational context is particularly vital when, as frequently happens, the illocutionary force of an utterance differs from its propositional content (as, for example, in the off-record request for someone to shut the window: It's cold in here). Lavandera (1987) claims that the ultimate estimate of the threat of a speech act or the redressive power of a politeness strategy, is provided "always and only" by the context, i.e. the situation in which the speech act occurs (1987: 1201).

Brown and Levinson's failure to consider situation constitutes a major weakness in their theory. A request, for example, may be made using completely different politeness strategies (in English society certainly), where P, D and R are constant and the only variable is situation. One could consider, for instance, the different strategies that would be used by a stranger requesting information from someone (a) on a station platform where both participants in the conversation are waiting for a train that has been delayed, and (b) on a moving train. P is likely to be unknown in both situations, while D and R are identical. And yet the request in (b) will be made using a strong form of negative politeness, while that in (a), taking into consideration the shared fate of the two individuals (delayed on a train journey), may well use a positive politeness strategy, or at best, a weaker form of negative politeness.

Brown and Levinson touch on this point, but do not incorporate it into their theory, merely conceding that "situational factors enter into the values for P, D, and R, so that the values assessed hold only for S (speaker) and H (hearer) in a particular context" (1987: 12).

Cultural factors are largely ignored in Brown and Levinson's original (1978) scheme of things. They acknowledge this fact in the introduction to the reissue, where they point out that in order to make use of their framework, it is necessary to have a lot of information about the particular cultural factors in the assigning of R-values. In Greece, for example, requests made to members of one's own “in-group” are not regarded as impositions, because

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it is seen as one's duty to help others in the in-group, and Greek requests, therefore, commonly employ positive politeness strategies (Sifianou, 1987). However, Brown and Levinson's model leads us to expect that negative politeness strategies will be employed universally in the performance of this speech act.

Matsumoto (1988, 1989) criticizes Brown and Levinson' s theory at an even deeper level, by striking at the heart of their interpretation of face. While accepting the general notion of face, and the desire to maintain face as the motivating force of any politeness system, she argues that the postulated constituents of face bear no relation to the constituents of face in Japanese society.

According to Matsumoto, Japanese people use conventionalised expressions of politeness (i.e. negative politeness strategies), not in order to minimize the degree of imposition on the hearer, but to show that they recognize their own and their hearer's relative positions in the social hierarchy; negative face is completely alien to them. She therefore insists that Brown and Levinson' s theory as it stands, cannot claim universality), and suggests that they modify their framework to allow for cross-cultural variability in the constituents of face. She adds that in applying this modified framework to a particular culture, knowledge of that culture would be required before the constituents of face could be determined. It should be noted that Brown and Levinson do allow for cultural variation in face. However, this is not at the conceptual level, but rather concerns details such as which acts are considered to be face-threatening in a particular culture.

Knowledge of a particular culture is necessary, not only for determining its face constituents, but also for gaining access to what is considered to be generally polite language in that culture. For while there seems to be general agreement on the existence of a universal politeness scale (Lavandera 1987, Odlin 1989), much of what is considered polite in one culture will not necessarily be so in another. A brief example will serve to illustrate this point. A group of advanced-level EFL students were asked to "translate" some formally-worded requests8 that would be acceptable to native speakers strangers, into informally-worded requests such as they might make to native speakers good friends. A French student translated "Could you possibly pass the bread?" into "Bread", which would be considered totally unacceptable by an English person.

Although Brown and Levinson recognize the existence of cultural differences in polite language, they continually underplay them in the interest of universals. However, they may be on shaky ground even in the universal arena. Schmidt and Richards (1985) argue that speech act strategies are only universal if they are phrased in very general terms. They point out that exact translations often fail to carry identical illocutionary force, and cite the modal verb "can", which has no directive force in languages such as Czech. Thus, "can you?" in Czech is reserved for enquiries about ability and would sound distinctly odd if used to make

“Formal” and “informal” correspond in the EFL world to negative and positive politeness

respectively.

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a request. Blum-Kulka (1983) points out that "could you?" would not be considered direct enough by Hebrew speakers to constitute a request and would probably not be interpreted as such.

Sifianou (1987) considers that while many of the similarities recorded by Brown and Levinson indicate a certain degree of universality, they do not rule out the possibility of major cultural differences. Hymes argues that knowledge of universal linguistic forms is not sufficient: one also needs to know "the ways in which such forms are selected and grouped together with others In cultural practices […] the social structure in which the forms of utterance occur and the cultural values which inform that structure" (1986: 79-80). In fairness to Brown and Levinson, they do recognize in the introduction to the reissue that they have given short drift to cultural variation. However, they do not carry this recognition through and adjust the balance of their theory accordingly.

Mathiot (1982) does not believe that knowledge of a culture is itself sufficient. She comments on the need for the development of a systematic procedure in which members of a culture (or even sub-culture) themselves, rather than outside analysts, inter the meanings of behavior in interaction within that culture. She considers that Brown and Levinson's universal interpretation of their data reflects the world-view of a middle-class, American subculture.

In fact, Brown and Levinson's failure to discriminate between their American English and British English data sometimes causes the reader to be misled over the situation in Britain. For example, they claim that the only difference between Excuse me, would you by any chance have the time? and Got the time, mate? is one of social distance, i.e. the speaker and hearer are strangers In the former and are either known to each other or "similar in social terms" in the latter. My own intuition suggest" that such is not the case in Britain, where the latter request is of a type frequently made by working class people (for want of a better description) indiscriminately to strangers of all social classes. On the other hand, it is virtually inconceivable to imagine a middle-class person uttering a request for the time in these words. Thus the implication that all speakers of English have both strategies at their disposal may hold true for American English, but it is of dubious validity for British English.

1.6.1.2. The neglect of discourse Closely related to the situational and cultural contexts is the linguistic context, here, language produced in the process of communication. The universality of Brown and Levinson' politeness strategies has been called into question because of the fact that their study of politeness is based on individual structures and sentences. Lavandera (1987) argues that a degree of politeness is not embraced by a specific linguistic device, but by the entire speech act within which it occurs. She cites Zimmin’s claim that politeness is a property of utterances rather than of sentences and, therefore, that politeness cannot be assigned to any structure out of linguistic context. Fraser and Nolen likewise point out that "no sentence is

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inherently polite or impolite…; it is not the expressions themselves but the conditions under which they are used that determine the judgement of politeness" (1981: 96). Such conditions of use would include both the context of an utterance (linguistic and situational) and the intonation pattern in which it was expressed.9

Coupland, Grainger and Coupland (1988) also take Brown and Levinson to task for operating at the level of the individual act (by which they appear to mean "strategy" rather than speech act) and register their surprise at this approach, in view of the current direction of discourse analysis (and its practical application in the EFL classroom, where attention is increasingly being focused on utterance rather than sentence level). Brown and Levinson themselves, in the second edition of their book, concede that "politeness is implicated by the semantic structure of the whole utterance, not communicated by “markers”or "mitigators" in a simple signaling fashion which can be quantified" (1987: 22).

Mathiot (1982) observes that there is a clear distinction between the nature of discourse (which she defines as "the product of language use") and of language ("the linguistic system"), which Brown and Levinson fail to make. She cotends, however, that although the two systems are radically different, this does not mean that discourse units may never coincide with grammatical units, simply that the external functioning of units of social behavior is unrelated to their internal structure. Thus, Shut the window! is grammatically an imperative and (depending on the context) may have imperative force. On the other hand, Will you shut the window is not grammatically an imperative, but may have imperative force, while Have a seat!, though grammatically an imperative, clearly does not have imperative force.

1.6.1.3. The rigidity of the politeness strategies 1 There appears to be much support for Brown and Levinson's claim that the three sociological variables, P, D and R are crucial in determining a speaker's level of politeness. However, various differences of opinion have been voiced concerning the rigidity of their scale of politeness in its relationship with the three variables. Coupland, Grainger and Coupland (1988) point out that the theory predicts that strategy of no redress (bald on record) for use among intimate equals. Yet power and distance considerations appear to be overridden by some stronger influence here. Brown and Levinson deal with this problem in the introduction to the second edition of their book, citing evidence which suggests that close friendship in fact promotes a greater rather than lesser degree of politeness. They concede, therefore, that "liking" might be another independent variable affecting the choice of strategy.

In attempting to move closer towards universal relevance, Brown and Levinson's framework would benefit from the incorporation of a further variable, that of shared fate.

9 The role played by intonation in the spoken expression of politeness has been underlined by many linguists.

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This relates to Brown and Gillman's observation of the emergence of a new trend, the move away from the use of the V10 pronoun towards the mutual use of T, where there is an element of shared fate. They note that it is becoming common "to regard any sort of camaraderie resulting from a common task or a common fate as grounds for T, and provide the dramatic example of French mountaineers, who apparently shift to the natural T above a certain altitude "where their lives hang by a single thread" (1972-262). However, this factor appears to operate also at far more mundane levels, as in the example of the platform previously mentioned. Fasolf (1990) considers that solidarity (or positive politeness) is composed of both intimacy (Brown and Levinson's D) and shared fate.

1.6.1.4. Universality of Politeness Strategies The universality of Brown and Levinson's ranking of negative politeness and off-record strategies is questioned by Blum-Kulka in her study of requests in Hebrew. She argues that for Israelis "a certain adherence to the pragmatic clarity of the message is an essential part of politeness", and therefore that “lengthening the inferential path beyond "reasonable limits" increases the degree of imposition and hence decreases the level of politeness” (1987: 132). Hence, in Israeli society at least, a hint made to a superior receives a lower politeness rating than a more direct request. Brown and Levinson discuss Blum-Kulka’s findings in the introduction to the second edition of their books, and conclude that this "efficiency factor" only operates in societies which place a high value on a superior's time (1987: 19). This is borne out in the case of Arabs, who place rather less value on a superior's time than do the Israelis, and whose politeness strategies are correspondingly longer-winded.

Some critics of Brown and Levinson' theory of universal contend that their politeness scale is inaccurate. Scollon and Scollon (1983) suggest that positive politeness is relevant to all aspects of a person's positive face, whereas negative politeness is FTA-specific. Thus, negative politeness serves to redress the threat of a particular FTA, while positive politeness has a more general redressive function. Since positive and negative politeness appear to emanate from different intentions, Coupland, Grainger and Coupland argue that Brown and Levinson's politeness hierarchy appears to be threatened, and that we should "be content with recognizing overlapping set of face-related strategies" rather than holding for a ranking of the five sets of strategies (1988: 225).

Another failing in terms of universal application of the theory is Brown and Levinson's restriction of the notion of politeness to situations where there is some sort of a threat (see Lavandera 1987). Thus, they neglect the fact that politeness is a permanent component of all speech acts. The is highlighted in the study of cultures which have an extensive system of

10 Brown and Gilman introduced the familiar T/V notation for the distinction between singular or familiar

T (from the Latin tu) and plural an polite V from the Latin vos) second person pronouns in any language. They then tried to clarify the close association of these pronouns with two dimensions fundamental to the analysis of all social life – the dimensions of power and solidarity.

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honorifics. For example, any theory of politeness should be able to account for the fact that Japanese has no forms unmarked for politeness, even in totally non-threatening situations such as giving the weather forecast on the television. Thus, although they put forward a strong case for strategies as a universal means of saving face, Brown and Levinson's theory of universal politeness appears not to be watertight when examined in detail from the viewpoints of members of different cultural communities. Indeed, during the years following the publication of their original edition, evidence both theoretical and empirical, demonstrating the extent of cross-cultural diversity in politeness systems, has been accumulating. In particular, much has been written about cross-cultural transfer of politeness rules and the way in which miscommunication may occur. The studies now cited are all supported by firm evidence drawn from a range of cultures.

1.6.2. Cross-cultural transfer of politeness Clyne (1977) demonstrates the significant part played in cross-cultural communication breakdown by pragmatic transfer from one culture to another. He later (1983) expands on this theme, by providing a comprehensive list of the rules of communicative competence which vary according to culture. He divides his list into "General rules" which express broad aspects of a culture and its institutions", such as rules governing the situations in which particular speech acts are considered relevant, or which terms of address are considered appropriate within relationships, and "Specific rules", or "individual formulae for speech acts", such as the different formulae employed for similar speech acts. Every item on the two lists is then verified by means of a cross-cultural questionnaire.

Wolfson speaks of "the sort of miscommunication which occurs when people transfer the rules of their own native speech communities to what seems to them to be a corresponding situation in a new speech community". She points out that speakers are "quite unconscious of the patterned nature of their own speech behavior and generally unaware that quite different norms and patterns are likely to prevail in other societies" (1983: 62).

Thomas (1983) breaks down cross-cultural miscommunication into "pragmatic failure", which may result from the inappropriate transfer of speech act strategies, through a misconception of their illocutionary force in the second language, and "sociopragmatic failure", (the latter term borrowed from Leech 1983), which may result from cross-cultural differences in "the social conditions placed on language in use”, such as differences in what constitute free and non-free goods, or what is considered to be taboo.

Richards and Sukwiwat consider "the effects of transfer of native-language conversational conventions into target-language conversational discourse" which occurs because "culturally specific assumptions and strategies for conversation surface in cross-cultural encounters" (1985: 129). They describe, for example, how the same situation may call for different routines in different cultures (e .g. a compliment may be acknowledged with thanks in English, but with silence or an apology in other cultures such as Thai), or

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how the same routines may have a different function (a Japanese person will say I am sorry where an English person would say Thank you).

Haverkate expands on the former in relation to thanking and making offers. He points out, for example, that "many Dutch tourists with some elementary knowledge of Spanish, do know how to thank when they are in Spain, but not when to thank"(1988: 392).

Richards and Sukwiwat, here in close agreement with Brown and Levinson's thesis, point out that an identical transaction will be subject to cross-cultural variation in terms of its costs", that is, the degree of threat perceived to be involved for the interlocutors. They argue that such variation is transferred to second language situations, resulting in the use of the wrong degree of directness or indirectness, such as the use of indirect strategies in situations where a native speaker would perceive no potential threat to face.

Blum-Kulka (1987), moreover, argues that "indirectness does not necessarily imply politeness" in all cultures. She considers that while there is a link between politeness and indirectness where conventional indirectness (Brown and Levinson’s "negative politeness" caregory) is involved, for native speakers of both Hebrew and English, this is not the case for non-conventional indirectness (Brown and Levinson’s “off-record” strategy) for native speakers of Hebrew, particularly where a hearer of superior position is concerned. For Israelis, she claims that "a certain adherence to the pragmatic clarity of the message is an essential part of politeness" (1987: 141).

A hint to an Israeli superior thus receives a lower rating than a direct request, whereas the opposite is true in a native-speaker English context. Brown and Levinson (1987) also discuss this point and conclude, following Lakoff, that this "efficiency factor" only operates in societies with relatively low value on a superior's time and therefore converse in a rather long-winded, indirect manner.

Thus, norms of politeness may differ from one culture to another, and in their efforts to be polite in a second language, non-native speakers are likely to transfer politeness strategies from their own to the target culture. Where such transfer leads to the use of indirect strategy in a routine where a direct one would be more appropriate, the non-native speaker may, paradoxically, appear less polite. The situation is compounded by the fact that conventionally indirect politeness strategies tend to be syntactically more complex and therefore lengthier than direct strategies (Carrell et al. 1981) and that a deviation from native-speaker norms of length of utterance, particularly where an utterance is lengthened, may lead to pragmatic failure (Blum-Kulka and Olshtain 1986). It is suggested (ibid.) that non-native speakers lengthen their utterances through lack of confidence in their ability to convey their message concisely. Thus, when non-native speakers inappropriately select an indirect strategy, either as a result of transfer from their own culture with the intention of sounding polite, or within the terms of the target language in an effort to be better understood, they may in fact achieve the opposite effect on both counts.

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1.7 A Reassessment Of Brown And Levinson’s Theories

In spite of the valid objections and criticisms mentioned, Brown and Levinson's work still remains an invaluable and comprehensive source for the concept of politeness. They do allow for a certain degree of cross-cultural variation, which they call "ethos" and define as "the affective quality of interaction characteristic of members of a society" (1978: 248).

Their distinction between positive and negative politeness strategies, whether mixed and multifunctional or not, and the subsequent differentiation between positive and negative politeness societies can shed very considerable light on differences between cultures and provide a secure basis for their investigation. However, Brown and Levinson claim that:

We cannot account for cultural differences in terms, say, of greater desire for positive-face satisfaction than negative-face satisfaction in some society (in the U.S.A. compared with England, for example). Note that if we allowed extrinsic weighting of face wants, then cultural (emic) explanations of cross-cultural differences would supersede explanation in terms of universal (etic) social dimensions like D (distance) and P (power) (1978: 249).

Their justification, however, does not appear to be adequate. If emic explanations can account better for the phenomena under investigation, why should we discard them in favor of etic explanations? The greater desire for the satisfaction of a particular aspect of face cannot be a superficial preference, but a choice deeply ingrained in the specific system of values predominant in the particular society. Moreover, social dimensions like vertical and horizontal distance and rate of impositions may be universal, but they are variably defined interculturally, deriving their weight from basic cultural values.

As Triandis and Triandis (1970: 178) point out, every society has established norms which determine the social distance that is seen as "correct" towards various classes of people. Moreover, as Brown and Levinson (1978: 253) themselves recognize "the actual factors that go into assessing the size of these three social variables are of course culturally specific (with even some leeway for idiosyncratic variation)". If these variables are culture specific, as is the content of face itself, all these considerations determine to a great extent the of politeness that will prevail in that society.

I am not implying here either that all societies or that societies as a whole can be clearly categorized as being either positively or negatively polite. It may be true that the theory is in need of modification (Matsumoto 1988) in order to become a model of universal applicability, as it is also clear that no society is likely to be completely uniform in its politeness. It is obviously true, as Brown and Levison point out (1978: 175), that complex, stratified societies will exhibit both kinds of politeness, with perhaps upper classes having a negative politeness ethos and lower classes a positive politeness ethos.

Nevertheless, we can distinguish societies according to ethos predominant in daily interactions, both verbal and non-verbal. In this sense then, it is true to say that these societies, for which the distinction is applicable, cannot be distinguished as either absolutely

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positive or absolutely negative, but rather as relatively more positive or relatively more negative, according to the type of ethos which is given more play. And this is what I mean when I talk of positive and negative politeness societies.

2. Speech Act Theory And Politeness

2.1 Introduction

The basic assumption in speech act theory is that the minimal unit of human communication are not linguistic expressions, but rather the performance of certain kinds of acts such as making statements, asking questions, giving directions, apologizing and so on.

Speech acts have been claimed by some (Austin 1962; Searle, 1969, 1975) to operate by universal pragmatic principles, and claimed by others to vary in conceptualization and verbalization across cultures and languages (Green, 1975; Wierzbicka 1985). Their modes of performance seem to be ruled by universal principles of cooperation and politeness11 (Brown & Levinson 1978; Leech 1983). And yet, cultures have been shown to vary greatly in their interactional styles, leading to different preferences for modes of speech act behavior.

Speech act theory has touched on the question of politeness, particularly as put forward by Austin and Searle. These linguistic philosophers argue that verbal communication is not just a means of conveying information, but a tool people use for a variety of goals. The things people can do linguistically have been grouped into a few categories. Searle (1979) proposed a system of five types of speech acts: assertives, whose function is to describe states and events in the world, such as asserting, boasting and claiming; directives, whose function is to direct the addressee to perform or not to perform an act (ordering, requesting); commissives, whose function is to commit the speaker to a future course of action (promising, threatening); expressives whose function is to express the speaker’s attitudes and feelings about something (thanking, pardoning, congratulating) and declarations, whose function is to change the status of the person or object referred to by performing the act successfully, such as judicial sentencing.

Leech (1983: 107) contends that "as far as Searle's categories go, negative politeness belongs pre-eminently to the directive class, while positive politeness is found pre-eminently in the commissive and expressive classes", adding that assertives are usually neutral as regards politeness, and that declarations being institutional rather than personal actions, can hardly involve politeness12. However, the specific situation and the participants by whom these speech acts are employed and received determine the kind and degree of politeness, which is also relative to socio-cultural values. There are a number of social factors such as the age, sex, familiarity, and social status of the participants, the spatio-

11 See section 1.8.3. 12 See Haverkate (1991): Foro Hispánico, n° 2.

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temporal setting, the weight of the particular imposition, and so on, which determine the kind of politeness strategies that will be employed in performing these speech acts. The importance of each one of these factors is not invariant, but dependent on all the others, and together they constitute part of the social knowledge each member of any society has. The fact that societies vary in respect to the importance they assign to these factors explains why different politeness strategies are predominantly used in different societies.

For Brown and Levinson, England is a society in which relatively high value is placed on social distance, and consequently negative and off-record strategies will prevail in social encounters. There may also be a preference for not performing the act at all if the degree of loss of face is great. They also suggest that “in societies where low D is the emphasis and P is minimized ... symmetrical use of bald on record and positive politeness would be expected" (1978: 256).

Brown and Levinson (1978) give a detailed account of the linguistic means that underlie the realization of each one of their four strategies or superstrategies:

1) bald on record,

2) positive politeness,

3) negative politeness, and

4) off record.

One of their basic claims is that their model is of universal applicability. The above super strategies are assumed to be in order of increasing politeness, although cross-cultural variation has been acknowledged between the two most basic strategies, that is, 2) and 3.)

Bearing in mind that positive and negative politeness interact in intricate ways, it is important to consider mainly these two superstrategies, and to examine whether and to what extent their linguistic manifestations present themselves in the data collected from both languages. If it is the case that, on the one hand, linguistic realizations of positive politeness strategies appear to prevail in Spanish data, and on the other, linguistic realizations of negative politeness strategies appear to prevail in the English data, then this may constitute a partial justification of the hypothesis that Spain is a positive politeness society when compared to England.

Here, I have restricted myself to examining the area of requests. This has been extensively studied, particularly in English, though not to the same extent in Spanish. Nevertheless, it may be argued that it is worthy of attention because it is frequent in a variety of everyday encounters, permits a variety of strategies, and is mainly responsible for judgements on the extent to which societies are classified as polite. Furthermore, the conventionalized realizations of requests, as well as their frequency, are perhaps the clearest indicators of whether one society is orientated to positive or negative politeness.

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2.2. The speech act of requesting

According to Searle, directives

“are attempts by the speaker to get the hearer to do something. They may be very modest attempts as when I invite you to do it, or they may be very fierce attempts as when I insist that you do it". (1979: 13).

For Bach and Harnish (1982: 47), who have borrowed the term “directive” from Searle, "directives express the speaker’s attitude toward some prospective action by the hearer" but "they also express the speaker’s intention (desire, wish) that his utterance or the attitude it expresses be taken as a reason for the hearer to act".

Requests fall into this group of directives. Although a number of subcategories of requests can be distinguished, such as requests for action, requests for information, requests for attention, and requests for sympathy, "all requests are basically requests for an action of some kind from the other person" (Labov and Fanshel 1977: 63).

Requests are usually considered to be a very good example of speech acts which imply intrusion on the addressee's territory and limit his freedom of action. In other words, they are intrinsically face-threatening activities, threatening the addressee's negative face (Brown and Levinson 1978: 70), and therefore comprise a category of inherently impolite acts in which negative politeness becomes essential (Leech 1983: 106). How far, however, is it a valid assumption that requests always threaten the addressee's negative face and, therefore, to what extent is negative politeness important? It could be argued that this will be the case only when negative face is more important and valued more highly than positive face. Requests can also imply closeness and intimacy, in the sense that one must feel close enough to ask somebody else to do something, and consequently positive politeness is important, too. Furthermore, there are requests, such as those addressed to shop assistants, which are not in themselves face-threatening, imposing acts,

It is true that every language affords its speakers a variety of grammatical possibilities they can choose from in order to avoid or mitigate the impact of a possible face threat. But it is also true that the choice among these and other alternatives may indicate intimacy. For instance, by using an embedded imperative13 one might indicate concern for the addressee's negative face by mitigating the imposition through indirectness, whereas using a bald imperative in a construction including a diminutive may indicate concern for the addressee's positive face, through the emphasis of affection.

Requests are made up of two parts: the core request and the various peripherical elements The core request is the main utterance which fulfils the function of requesting, irrespective of its form and can stand by itself; that is, it can be used successfully without any peripherical elements. However, in most cases this is preceded and/or followed by expressions which mitigate or aggravate its force, but which do not change its propositional

13 See Erwin-Tripp (1976)

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content. These peripherical elements include address forms, various introductory utterances, explanations and justifications for the request, hedges, please and so on . In addition to this external modification of requests, we can also have internal modification14, that is, devices which affect the expression of the core request, such as number, tense and diminutives.

2.2.1 Form and function of core requests Requests in both Spanish and English can be realized linguistically with imperatives, interrogatives, negative-interrogatives and even declaratives. Sometimes even elliptical forms are found.

a) Imperatives: can function as requests in both languages, though they are more common in Spanish:

Pass me the salt, please! (Please would be necessary in English to downgrade the impositive character of the imperative).

i Pásame la sal! In English, direct imperatives are usually defined as constructions appropriate for

commands and instructions (Lyons 1968: 307); consequently, they are thought of as less appropriate or even unacceptable for making requests. This inappropriateness has led to great restriction on the use of imperatives as requesting devices, and their use is condemned by laymen and scholars (Clark and Schunk 1980: 111).

For both Lakoff (1977: 101) and Leech (1983: 119) imperatives are the least polite constructions when compared to declaratives and interrogatives. Leech's explanation of this is that "an imperative impositive is tactless in that it risks disobedience, which is a fairly grave type of conflict situation".

These views are of course valid to a certain extent, as far as the English norms of politeness, or rather formality, are concerned, but they are not and cannot be universal principles of polite linguistic realizations. According to Thomas (1983: 102). "polite usage in Russian permits many more imperatives than does English" and adds that "transferred into English, such direct imperatives seem brusque and discourteous". In Spanish, imperatives can express commands, but also desires and wishes, suggesting that their force will be different. Their frequency is such that they are remarkable even to observers who do not speak the language well, and if those observers happen to be English, they may easily become offended by the degree of Spanish "impoliteness" and "authoritarianism". This important definitional difference seems to stem from the fact that the Spanish morphological system for marking the imperative is more elaborate than the English. In English, the imperative is an uninflected form and is marked for neither aspect nor number. In Spanish, on the other hand, there is a distinct morphological system marking imperatives for singular and plural, and also for formality and informality.

14 This distinction is borrowed from Faerch & Kasper (1984: 224).

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Brown and Levinson (1978: 100) contend that "direct imperatives stand out as clear examples of bald-on-record usage" and distinguish two categories. The first includes those cases in which there is no minimization of the face threat because other needs override face concerns, for instance, in cases of real or metaphorical urgency, of warnings, wishes, and so on. The second category includes those cases in which the minimization of face is conveyed by implication. The speaker performs the face-threatening activity in an attempt to alleviate the addressee's anxiety not to impose on the speaker, for instance, in cases of welcomings, farewells and offers.

Brown and Levinson (1978) draw a distinction between “optimistic” and "pessimistic" ways of performing face-threatening activities and point out that this is perhaps the most important difference between positive and negative politeness ways of performing face-threatening acts. Imperatives, then, can be seen as devices indicating optimism that the addressee is willing to carry out the act requested by the speaker. This kind of presumed willingness and cooperation springs from the social rule which prescribes it as the duty or even obligation of every individual to help others. The preference for imperative requesting constructions is, I believe, a partial justification for the claim made earlier that Spaniards tend resort to positive politeness devices while the English tend to resort to more negative politeness devices.

b) Interrogatives: they appear to be the most prolific group of requests means in English. In Spanish, they are common, too, though not as common as in English largely because imperative constructions are socially more acceptable.

The main formal difference between Spanish and English common, everyday interrogative requests is that in English there is a stronger preference for more elaborate constructions with modals, whereas in Spanish they are frequently formulated with the present indicative or past subjunctive constructions:

Could you tell me the time? Can you tell me the time? ¿Me daría fuego? ¿Me das fuego? The main question which arises is what is it that allows the present indicative to be

used so frequently with direct requests in Spanish, but not in English. In English we have the continuous present tense, which usually describes what is happening at the time of speaking, and the simple present, which indicates habitual action. In Spanish there are also two forms of the present tense, whose range of meanings encompasses those covered by the two English present tenses. It may be the clear difference in meaning between the two English present tenses which makes them unacceptable for use as requests, because while one may request people to do things more or less immediately, one would hardly request an action which is already in progress or occurs habitually, in the same way that we would not

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knowingly request an action that has already been done. But why doesn't this apply to Spanish as well?

A more plausible interpretation of this difference may be a contrast in the speakers' need to distance themselves from acts which can be viewed as encoding peremptory behavior. The indicative expresses a certainty and/or reality, whereas the subjunctive expresses the unreal15. The English speaker thus seems to be enabled to soften the directness and assertiveness of face-threatening acts by shifting the focus away from present reality. In contrast, Spanish speakers do not need this kind of distancing to the same extent so that present indicative constructions are appropriate as requesting means. In other words, it seems that we have a differential preference for involvement versus detachment.

¿Me abres la puerta" could be translated literally in English as "are you opening the door for me?" or "do you open the door for me?" “¿me das un cigarrillo?" as "are you giving me a cigarette?" or "do you give me a cigarette?". These are perfectly acceptable and indeed very frequent requesting constructions in Spanish, but not in English, and literal translations cannot render this force. In English, if such constructions are used, they will sound like questions for information about a habitual action, or about one in progress, and such it is extremely difficult to think of an appropriate where they could be used as requests. We will have to resort to modals to render the above constructions in English. Thus, "¿me la puerta?" can be "can/could you open the door?" This is a conventionalized structure and, at least theoretically, leaves more choice to the addressee than an unmodified direct question.

Tentativeness and lack of commitment are English cultural values, and obviously explicit simple present tense questions apparently do not sound tentative or pessimistic enough to be regarded as appropriate requesting means, whereas modals offer this possibility. It is the notion of tentativeness conveyed through conditionals which renders them more polite than corresponding indicatives lacking this feature. Present indicative constructions may be used as requests in English only when they are negatively phrased and are followed by a question tag, or when they are indirect, that is, when their requesting force is implicit:

you haven't got a camera, have you? are you making coffee? Are the English then more considerate towards the addressee than Spaniards and, thus,

more polite since they minimize impositions by leaving more options when they ask others to do things for them? Such a suggestion cannot be justified. Although whimperatives16 sound more tentative and less of an imposition, they are conventionalized, which means that although they appear to leave more choice to the addressee, in actual fact, unless a substantial, real, or contrived reason is presented, one cannot refuse to comply any more

15 However, notice the difference in Spanish between the indicative in “si viene” and the subjunctive “cuando venga”. This subjunctive form is more real than the indicative. 16 “Whimperatives” are requests formulated by means of a question.

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easily than the Spaniard who receives a more direct question directive. Here again, the differential preference between Spanish and English interrogative requests seems to stem from the concept of imposition. In Spanish, small everyday tasks are seen as less or not at all imposing and can be requested with more direct constructions, especially between familiars and equals. Whimperatives and present tense indirect questions are utilized in situations of real uncertainly or in cases where there is distance between the interlocutors. By contrast, in similar contexts in English, whimperatives are the conventionalized means for requesting, and indirect present tense questions are saved for cases of greater uncertainty.

Thus, the conventionalized interrogative request forms in Spanish point to a positive politeness society, whereas those in English point to a negative politeness society, where social norms restrict the appropriateness of directness.

Requests in question form can be both yes-no questions and wh-questions and can also take the form of highly elaborate interrogative constructions, such as, Would you be kind enough to sign this for me please?, whose literal equivalents in Spanish are very infrequent.

Combinations of interrogative-negative constructions can also be encountered in both languages:

Can't I stay with him? ¿No me puedo quedar con él? c) Declaratives can also function as requests in both languages. They fall into two

main groups. The first one includes examples of what Ervin-Tripp (1976) and others have called "need statements", such as

I want to check the possibility, Quiero comprobar la posibilidad I need a birth certificate, Necesito un certificado de nacimiento. The second group consists of cases which have been called "hints", such as It is dark

in here intended by the speaker as a request for the addressee to do something such as turn on the light. Sometimes great effort is required by the addressee to understand the speaker's actual intention, and an outsider may not even realize that a request has been made. On the whole, however, such requests are considered polite in that they leave options open to the addressees to interpret them in the way they wish, so that they do not feel compelled to conform to something they do not want to do.

Some of these hints (It’s cold in here) are so conventionalized that they require no extra effort to be understood as requests than do their more direct equivalents; nevertheless, even here the addressees might have to think a bit about what exactly they are expected to do.

In English, I’d like is a conventionalized way of stating a desire, the would enhancing the unreal and hypothetical. The verbs need and want are not conventionalized and are usually avoided since they sound too direct to be polite. In Spanish, the verb querer is a frequent way of introducing requests of this sort.

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It appears then from this brief account that both languages afford their speakers similar, though not identical, linguistic means to perform requests. This is not surprising because, as Bolinger (1981: 91) contends, "grammatical functions probably started as social functions thousands of years ago"; and he adds that "as societies grew more complex, the simpler social functions became diversified and the old forms had to be adapted to new purposes". Societies, however, developed differently, and the needs and values which sprang from their development were also different.

The choice of structures open to speakers in making requests is not entirely free since it conveys different attitudes, different social norms and values, as well as personal differences. For instance, the choice of a negatively constructed request implies a strong negative attitude as far as the outcome of the request is concerned - linguistic pessimism. Question forms and modals, especially in their past tense form, indicate mild or strong hesitation and tentativeness. Imperative and declaratives constructions, on the other hand indicate optimism that the outcome of the request will be successful.

2.2.2 Peripherical elements in requests These are expressions which mitigate or aggravate the force of requests, but which do not change their propositional content. These peripherical elements include address forms, various introductory utterances, explanations and justifications for the request, hedges, please and so on, In addition to this external modification of requests, we can also have internal modification, that is, devices which affect the core request, such as number, tense and diminutives.

The request sequence may include: a) alerters which are opening elements preceding the actual request, such as address terms (1), or attention getters (2):

(1) John, clean up the kitchen.

(2) Excuse me, could you give me a lift to town?, and

b) supportive moves, which are units external to the request, which modify its impact by either aggravating (3) or mitigating (4) its force:

(3) Stop bothering me or I’ll call the police

(4) Could you clean up this mess? I’m having some friends over for dinner tonight.

Requests are often preceded by checks on availability (Are you busy?) and attempts to get a precommitment ("Will you do me a favour?"). Some supportive moves can serve as requests by themselves.

The different types of alerters and supportive moves are given in detail in the Coding Categories in the Appendix.

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It is commonly accepted that the force of a request does not depend solely, or even mainly perhaps, on the construction employed. The kind of peripherical modification chosen is also a determining factor contributing greatly to the force of the utterance. Therefore, once we have discussed the preferred request structures in English and Spanish, we should proceed with the types of peripherical modification available in both languages, whose function is to soften or to intensify the force of a request.

According to House and Kasper (1981: 177) intensifying devices or upgraders are very infrequent with requests in English. This fact has led to an extensive study of downgraders or softerners instead. The process of mitigating is defined by Fraser (1978: 22) as "the intentional softening or easing of the force of the message – a modulation of the basic message intended by the speaker". What happens in Spanish? Besides mitigation, intensification is also used with requests in Spanish. It appears that aggressive verbal behavior is more acceptable in Spain than in England; such behavior is related to the looser restrictions on the expression of feelings in Spanish.

Two general observations concerning internal modification are derived from the examination of the data: the kind of modification favored by the two languages is not only different but also contributes to the elaboration of English requests.

The first observation concerns alerters. Alerters appear to be an integral part of most requests in English. By contrast, their use in Spanish appears to be more limited to cases in which they retain their literal meaning; this difference contributes to a more direct realization of requests in Spanish. The tense and aspect of these alerters (when they appear) can vary in English and may or may not include a modal. Openers are directed towards the perlocution, i.e., the effect that the utterance will have on the addressee, rather than towards illocution, that is, the act itself. They enable the speaker to sound vague, detached, distancing him/herself from the request itself. The major difference found between Spanish and English is the possibility of a negative realization in English; for instance, I don't think or I don't suppose. This kind of formulation is absent in Spanish. Thus, clearly both the constructions used and their modification contribute to greater elaboration and formality in English.

The other observation has to do with the form of modification which is most prolific in each language. Most modification in English is achieved by means of mitigators, which make the request more tentative. The most common English modifier of this type, frequently used with requests, are just and possibility to modify verbs. In contrast to this, Spanish uses diminutives extensively to indicate smallness and thus closeness. Intensifiers, on the other hand, which reinforce the request, are extremely rare in English, whereas they are more frequent in Spanish. For instance, the form "ya" can be used in Spanish to intensify negatively loaded utterances and implies impatience: "Acaba de una vez ya". Another intensifier is the form "venga" which is used as an extra persuasive element, usually with imperatives.

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Does this mean that Spaniards are less polite and less considerate of other people than the English? This would perhaps be the case if politeness depended entirely on the kind and number of words in the utterance, that is, its elaboration, but obviously this cannot be the case. On the one hand, elaboration may indicate formality but not necessarily politeness, and clearly these two concepts are not synonymous. Elaborate realizations are apparently closely related to one kind of politeness - negative politeness. Structures by themselves are not inherently polite or impolite, as has been pointed out elsewhere, and this would also appear to be true of their modification. Both the structures and their modification acquire their politeness weight within a specific culture.

As regards external modification, the main difference between Spanish and English seems to be the Spanish tendency to give reasons for the requests more frequently than in English which is a feature of positive politeness. What is essential in understanding this differential choice among the devices available in the two languages is that different social norms and values bring about different conventionalized patterns for the realization of speech acts in each language.

2 3 The Politeness of Indirect Requests

One of the basic distinctions offered by speech act theory is between direct speech acts, where the speaker says what he or she means, and indirect speech acts where he or she means more than, or something other than, what he or she says. Most of the standard speech act theories would accept this distinction, but, when it comes to precisely defining what it meant by the notion of indirectness, the situation becomes more complex. Some theorists, like Searle, link certain types of indirectness with certain forms of language through a claim for conventionality. According to this thesis, certain indirect forms are conventionally used to perform certain acts. Others, like Sperber and Wilson (1986), stress the role of general pragmatic principles (following Grice 1975), notably the principle of relevance, to account for the process by which indirect meanings are encoded and decoded in context. But it is entirely an empirical matter what forms of indirectness are used in any given language for the performance of a specific speech act.

The issue of indirectness has been one of the central issues in pragmatics in recent years, including research into the following questions: Are there systematic types of indirectness for all speech acts? Are these types universal? The repertoire of direct and indirect manifestations of requests provided by our data allows us to discuss those matters in detail.

Most work regarding indirectness relates mainly to requests, since they exhibit a rich variety of features of the phenomenon. This may suggest a greater intrinsic face-threatening

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element being involved in requests than in other speech acts, as a result of which politeness has been regarded as the most basic motivation of indirectness17.

Blum-Kulka18 and Weizman19 discuss these issues from two perspectives: the former by focusing on conventionally indirect requests, the latter by focusing on non-conventionally indirect requests.

Given a specific situation, speakers can select from among a variety of forms of request ranging from the direct and straightforward to the mildly or strongly indirect. For instance, one can request somebody else to open a window by saying:

Open the window, please. Would it be possible to open the window, please? It is hot in here. The first utterance is the direct way of performing the act, whereas the second and the

third alternatives have been regarded as indirect ways, though not unquestionably20. Indirect speech acts convey two meanings: literal and implied. Models have been

developed to explain how the implied meaning is derived (e.g. Gordon and Lakoff 1975; Searle 1975). These models have assumed several steps:

1. the literal meaning of the utterance is comprehended, 2. some cue indicates that this is not sufficient, and 3. inferential rules are implemented in order to derive the intended meaning from the

literal meaning and the context in which it occurs. Grice's conversational cooperative principle has been considered basic to step 2

(Searle 1975); that is, the listener recognizes that while the literal meaning is inadequate in the context, the speaker was being cooperative when formulating the utterances and therefore it must have some relevance. The rules by which the inference is derived in step 3 vary from theory to the next (see Levinson, 1983).

More recently, it has been argued that the interpretation of indirect speech acts may not occur in this fixed step-like fashion at all, but in a more complex interactive manner (Clark 1979; Sperber and Wilson, 1986)

It has been argued that conventional indirect speech acts ("Can you pass the salt?") have become frozen over time so that the implied meaning ("Pass me the salt") is processed automatically, by passing the literal meaning (Gibbs 1982). It is unlikely, however, that this explanation is adequate. There is empirical evidence that the literal meaning of indirect speech acts is not frozen, even in highly conventional forms, but continues to play a role in the communication process (Clark and Lucy 1975; Clark and Schunk 1980). Those authors 17 Searle claims that as far as directives are concerned, politeness is the main motivation for indirectness.

But Leo Hickey (1991 a) has rightly noted that there are other stylistic reasons for the choice of indirect speech acts. He names up to 16 factors contributing to indirectness.

18 Soshana Blum-Kulka (1989) 19 Weizman (1989) 20 See Davidson (1975)

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found that different forms of the same requests (e.g. "Can you tell me where Jordan Hall is?" and "Might I ask you where Jordan Hall is?"21 were perceived by raters as differing in perceived "politeness", despite the uniformity of the intended request. Furthermore, the perceived politeness, differed systematically according to the nature of the literal question being asked.

It is probable, therefore, that even highly conventional indirect speech acts can only be understood by rejecting the literal meaning in favor of another22.

I have mentioned "conventional indirect speech acts", but there is another type of indirect speech act, which is not conventionalized. It is well known that conventional indirect speech acts, like requests, are interpretable on at least two levels, literally or as requests. But it is important to note that, due to the pragmalinguistic conventions operating on the properties of the utterance the illocutionary range of conventional forms necessarily includes the potential of the requestive interpretation. This is not necessarily the case with non-conventionalized speech acts. Hence, conventional indirectness is characterized by a particular kind of ambiguity which is encoded in the utterance's meaning and which allows it to be intended and interpreted on either one of the two levels or on both simultaneously23.

On the other hand, utterances in context are often happy carriers of multiple pragmatic forces.24 Hints intended and/or interpreted as requests are often ambiguous in this way. The focus of ambiguity here is at the level of the speaker’s meaning(s) and is open to negotiation in context, but does not necessarily have to be resolved25.

How universal is the phenomenon of conventional indirectness? Some linguists26 have found the category of conventional indirectness is universal, with some degrees of cross-linguistic variation. Another finding revealed the prominence of conventional indirectness as a highly favored requesting option exploited by all the languages examined27. But before making or accepting claims concerning the degree of politeness encoded in indirectness universally, the cultural specificity of the phenomenon should be considered. This is what we shall do in the following section.

The politeness difference between "Would you mind making me a cup of coffee?" and "hazme una taza de café" lies in the type of (in)directness involved and the extent of conventionalization rather than in the degree of politeness. The consequences of such requests offer ample evidence for this claim. All other factors being equal, the requesters

21 This is obviously polite because it is virtually impossible. 22 Some clinical studies have suggested that there is a dissociation in the capacity to comprehend the literal

and non-literal meanings of conventional indirect speech acts in different brain-damaged populations. 23 This type of ambiguity is sometimes called pragmatic duality (Blum-Kulka 1989). 24 Cf. Leech (1980), (1983); Clark (1979); Thomas (1985). Hints are often ironical. 25 This type of ambiguity has been termed pragmatic vagueness (Blum-Kulka, 1989). 26 Soshana Blum-Kulka, J. House and G Kasper (1989). 27 Las lenguas estudiadas dentro del proyecto CCSARP (Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project)

fueron el ingles australiano, el francés, el hebreo y el español de Argentina.

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above will receive their coffees and the requestees will not feel that they have been treated impolitely. Thus it seems that in addition to being asked to rate utterances according to their degree of politeness, informants should be asked to consider and evaluate the speaker's intentions and the addressee's reactions in response to such utterances. If the speaker did not intend to be impolite and the addressee did not feel imposed upon in conforming with the request, then such considerations provide ample evidence that the constructions used were appropriately polite.

Structures, whether direct or indirect, are not inherently polite or impolite: they acquire such characteristics from the speaker's intentions, the addressees’ expectations, and various other social factors present in the situation. In some cultures28, distance and politeness are closely related and that is the reason why many scholars have explained indirectness in terms of politeness.

3. Experimental Study: A Comparative Study Of The Indirect Speech Realization Patterns Of Requests In English And Spanish Evidence so far has come from theoretical considerations. But we also intend to seek evidence coming from an empirical study. In spite of the inadequacies mentioned, we will be using Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987), as they provide an insightful account of the different ways in which people can convey politeness. It seems that the interactional differences between Spanish and English societies can be satisfactorily explained along the lines of the Brown and Levinson model. Their distinction between positive and negative politeness leads to another interesting distinction, that of positive and negative politeness societies, a distinction which, even with its “immense crudity", as Brown and Levinson (1978: 250) put it, can shed light on the differences in the social relationships prevailing in different cultures.

Brown and Levinson say that England can be considered a negative politeness society when compared to America. It can be argued that Spain is a positive politeness society when compared to England. This may sound like a very blunt generalization, but it can be useful to divide societies according to the “ethos” predominant in their interactions, both verbal and non-verbal. In any case, politeness orientation would be relative rather than absolute.

"There are interesting differences between everyday uses of peninsular Spanish and British English for manifesting politeness, although these differences are usually matters of degree rather than absolutes" (Hickey, L. 1991 a: 3).

The similarities and differences are mostly matters of degree, preponderancies and tendencies, rather than absolute equivalences and discrepancies: there is usually some

28 In the Anglo-Saxon culture this is oprecisely the case.

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common-core politeness with differences at the (more or less broad) edges" (Hickey, L. 1991 c: 3).

By positive politeness orientation we mean that Spaniards in general seem to attach more importance to positive politeness than the English do, and the English seem to attach more significance to negative politeness than the Spaniards do, and it is important to stress that this does not imply that either side is more or less polite than the other.

These differences are expressed and perceived in various ways, according to circumstances, by social groups, depending on the background of the participants, their type and level of education, sensitively to physical contact, the situation and context, degrees of familiarity or acquaintance between the participants and many other such determining factors. Consequently there is a whole grid of relevant similarities and discrepancies, and any attempt to study or even observe them must pay great attention to linguistic and non-linguistic detail, both in the polite (or impolite) behavior itself and in all the variables of the surrounding context.

3.1. An inquiry into method

This experimental study tries to provide a way in which the linguistic realizations of the speech acts of requesting could be compared across the two languages and cultures, and examined within a given language, and to look at the production of this speech act by native speakers of the two languages.

The study of cross-cultural Pragmatics holds a fascination for language teachers, researchers and students of linguistics. And this stems from the serious trouble to which pragmatic failure can lead. No error of grammar can make a speaker seem so incompetent, so inappropriate, so foreign as the kind of trouble a learner gets into when he or she does not understand or otherwise disregards a language's rule of use. And the worst thing is that this is usually attributed to the individual's manners, and it can cause not only misunderstandings but, at times, offence. This is the reason why we set out to do empirical research in this area of Pragmatics.

In order to get the data from which we would draw empirical evidence, we employed a discourse completion test much like a written questionnaire, to get at the linguistic strategies available to speakers to perform requests. This method allows the elicitation of data from a large sample of subjects relatively easily, and seems to effectively control the contextual variables which are important to the study. This method has been especially effective for the comparison of strategies from different languages, and for the comparison of strategies used by native speakers in their own language29.

The test consists of scripted dialogues that represent socially differentiated situations. Each dialogue is preceded by a short description of the situation, specifying the setting, and

29 It was originally developed for comparing the speech act realization of native and non-native Hebrew

speakers (Blum-Kulka 1982, following Levenston 1975).

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the social distance between the participants and their status relative to each other, followed by an incomplete dialogue. Respondents are asked to complete the dialogue by providing the speech act aimed at.

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The following example a) is constructed to elicit a request: a) At the University Situation: Ann missed a lecture yesterday and would like to borrow Judith 's notes. Ann:_________________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Judith: Sure, but let me have them back before the lecture next week. The questionnaire on requests we administered contains 5 such situations, which elicit

requests. It has been argued by Wolfson et al. (1989) and others that, In order to get a more

complete understanding, not only of the range of linguistic strategies, but of the situations requiring the performance of a given speech act, it is necessary to collect the data ethnographically. This method can succeed in revealing the linguistic strategies actually used in many contexts in a given language and culture. Unfortunately, if the objective of the researcher is to observe many instances of a speech act in the same situational and interpersonal context, it is impossible to control the contextual variables so as to ensure that the same context will be repeated even once.

Another method which can be employed to collect speech act data is the role play method, the one employed by Rintell (1979, 1981), Walters (1981) and by Zimin (1981). In this method , the situation is described to the subject orally by the experimenter(s), who then asks the subject to say what the person they are role playing would say in the situation. The subject is asked to role-play himself or herself under circumstances described in the experiment. The advantage of this method is that the subjects have the opportunity to say what and as much as they would like to say, and their spoken language is thought to be a good indication of their "natural" way of speaking. I have used this method in combination with the discourse completion tests.

3.2. Data Elicitation

The questionnaire on requests contains 5 situations. The situations are as follows: S1 A student asks his roommate to clean up the kitchen the latter has left in a mess the

night before. S2 A student asks another student to lend her some lecture notes. S3 A student asks people living on the same street for a ride home. S4 A police man asks a driver to move her car. S5 A lecturer asks a student to change the date of his/her presentation. The test consists of scripted dialogues that represent these situations. Each dialogue is

preceded by a short description of the situation, specifying the setting, and the social distance between the participants and their status relative to each other, followed by an

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incomplete dialogue. Respondents were asked to complete the dialogue by providing the speech act aimed at.

All dialogues contain a response to the missing turn. This turn in each dialogue is designed to signal illocutionary uptake. By complying with the (missing) request, we provided the respondents with co-textual clues for the speech act needed to complete the dialogues. In natural discourse, this speech act might be negotiated across several turns. The contextual frame provided further signals that this response is being understood in the given context as fully realizing a specific speech act.

In terms of content, the situation depicted by the dialogues reflect everyday occurrences of the type expected to be familiar to the population tested.

In order to be able to compare the written and oral versions, I modified the original version of the discourse completion test to adapt it to the role-play method. The major modification was the elimination of the line of dialogue given after the blank line for the subject’s response. Thus, I changed the situations as in the following:

Original version: You missed a lecture or talk you were very interested in, and you want to get some

notes from a fellow student/partner. You: I missed yesterday's lecture on AIDS. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jane: Yes, of course. You can borrow them whenever you like. Revised version: You were sick and missed one of the classes of the course you are

enrolled in. You would like to borrow another student's notes. You meet Jane, who is your classmate. What would you say to get Jane to lend you her notes for the class you missed?

There is a second questionnaire on indirect requests, consisting of five situations. In each situation the respondents were asked to select the correct interpretation for each indirect speech act.

As can be seen in the above examples of a discourse completion test and of a role play, the subjects were not asked to respond as they would in a given situation, but as they believe the character supplied in the situation would. Subjects were asked to take on a variety of roles. A space about 3 or 4 lines long was left for the written response on the page. In the role play, the question was exactly the same, and there was no limit put on the time in which the respondent might speak. The role-plays were tape recorded and transcribed.

3.3. Subjects

Native speakers of both Spanish and English took part in the experiment. The native-speaker subjects in the study were students at two British Universities (Salford and

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London), and a Spanish University (Zaragoza). By choosing students as our target population, we wished to ensure as much homogeneity as possible in social class, level of income, educational background, occupation and age range. The samples consisted of approximately equal numbers of males and females in each country.

The study was carried out in two parts. In the first part, thirty-four English students participated in the experiment. Sixteen of the 34 responded to the written questionnaire, and the remaining 18 participated in the role-plays.

For the second part, similar data were collected from native Spanish speaking subjects. In this way, we would see if the linguistic realization patterns of requests were the same or different, and, if different, to what extent they are different. Thirty-seven native speakers participated in the study. Written data were collected from 23 of these subjects, and oral data from 14.

3.4. Situational variation

The items vary in terms of the participants’ role relationship, i.e., on the dimensions of dominance (social power), and social distance (familiarity) as follows: Request situation Social distance Dominance S1 Kitchen - SD x = y S2 Notes - SD x = y S3 Ride +SD x<y S4 Policeman +SD x>y S5 Lecturer -SD x>y

3. 5. Data analysis

All the data were analyzed following a coding system based on frames of primary features expected to be manifested in the realization of requests. The frame provides the meta-paradigm for the analysis of the data, allowing for both zero realizations for each feature as well as sub-classifications of listed features. The coding scheme in the study is based on frames of primary features expected to be manifested in the realization of requests.

The unit of analysis for requests for the data provided by the discourse completion test is the discourse-filler: the utterance(s) supplied by the informant in completing the test item.

Later on we shall list the primary features coded for requests. (See the Appendix 2).

3.6. Hypothesis tor the study pt Requests The analytical framework for the investigation of speech acts developed for this study is based on a series of working hypothesis regarding what constitutes possible candidates for universal features of requests.

For requests, these were the hypothesis guiding our work:

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a) In requesting behavior it is possible to distinguish among central phenomena, such as strategy types, as different internal and external modification.

b) requesting behavior is inherently based on choices from a variety of options ranging from direct to indirect.

c) the scale of directness encompasses at least three main types of option: direct strategy type, ranging from the use of the imperative (mood derivable) to other types of impositives, conventionally indirect strategy type and non-conventionally indirect strategy type.

3.7. Request sequence

We identify as a request sequence all the utterances involved in the turn completing the dialogue in the discourse completion test. For example:

Judith, I missed class yesterday, do you think I could borrow your notes? I’ll return them by tomorrow.

As this example illustrates, the request sequence may include: alerters, such as address terms (Judith), supportive moves (I missed class yesterday), the request proper or Head Act (could I borrow your notes?) optionally elaborated with downgraders (do you think?) or upgraders and postposed supportive moves (I’ll return).

Alerters. When preceding requests, alerters serve as attention-getters, and hence are equal in function to all verbal means used for this purpose.

Supportive moves. Requests are often preceded by checks on availability ("Are you busy") and attempts to get a precommitment ("Will you do me a favor?") . Some supportive moves can serve as requests by themselves.

Head Acts. This is the request proper. The Head Act is that part of the sequence which might serve to realize the act independently of other elements. Head Acts can vary on two dimensions: a) strategy type and b) perspective.

a) Range of linguistic strategies to perform a request Following a previous classification of request strategy types in empirical research (Ervin-Tripp 1976; House and Kasper 1981), we classify requests on a nine-point scale of categories. The nine strategy types on a scale of indirectness are as follows:

1. mood derivable: utterances in which the grammatical mood of the verb signals the illocutionary force ("Leave me alone", "Déjame en paz").

2. performatives: utterances in which the illocutionary force is explicitly named (" I am asking you to clean up the mess", "Te pido que limpies la basura").

3. hedged performatives: utterances in which the naming of the illocutionary force is modified by hedging expressions ("I would like to ask you to give your presentation a week earlier than scheduled").

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4. obligation statements: utterances which state the obligation of the hearer to carry out the act. (" You’ll have to move that car").

5. want statements: utterances which state the speaker’s desire that the hearer carries out the act ("I really wish you'd stop bothering me").

6. suggestory formulae : utterances which contain a suggestion to do x ("how about cleaning up?").

7. query preparatory: utterances containing a reference to preparatory conditions (e.g. ability, willingness) as conventionalized in any specific language ("Could you clear up the kitchen, please?”, “Te importaría mover el coche?").

8. strong hints: utterances containing a partial reference to object or element needed for the implementation of the act (“You have left the kitchen in a right mess").

9. mild hints: utterances that make no reference to the proper (or any of its elements) but are interpretable as requests by context ("I am a nun" in response to a persistent hassler).

As we move up this scale, the length of the inferential process needed for identifying the utterance as a request becomes longer; thus, while in 1, 2 and 3 illocutionary force is derivable via linguistic indicators, in 4 and 5, its understanding relies on the semantic content of the utterance. While in 6 and 7 interpretation is aided by conventional usage, in 8 and 9 it tends to rely heavily on the context. These various means are all subservient to the pragmatic end of relative requestive transparency (directness). Languages may differ in the relative position granted to individual strategy types on this scale, but a distinction between three main levels of directness has been empirically shown to be valid across several languages (Blum-Kulka 1987). These three levels are:

a) direct strategies (1 to 5)

b) conventionally indirect strategies (6 and 7)

c) non-conventionally indirect strategies (8 and 9).

b) Perspective Choice of perspective presents an important source of variation in requests. Requests can emphasize the role of the agent and be speaker oriented ("Can I have it?") or focus on the role of the recipient and be hearer oriented ("Can you do it?"). Two other possibilities are for requests to be phrased as inclusive ("Can we start cleaning now?") or as impersonal ("It needs to be cleaned").

The choice of the kinds of constructions we have been talking about is extremely relevant. This choice includes, among other things, a decision regarding the element that will be placed in the prominent position. Requests in both languages include explicit or

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implicit references to the speaker, the addressee and the action requested. (This is not true of non-conventionally indirect requests). Speakers have at their disposal a number of alternatives so that they can place any of these entities in the prominent position:

a) The speaker made prominent: In this case, we have two varieties: ”permission requests" and “permission directives” (Ervin-Tripp 1976: 37): 'Can I have your pencil for a second?'

versus

'Can I have my pencil back?'

The former variety is far more common than the latter, because the speaker asks permission to perform an act, whereas in the latter it is the addressee who will have to perform the act and the request may also imply criticism. Both varieties may be introduced with either 'may' or 'can' in English, whereas in Spanish, since there is no verb rendering the meaning “may”, the only possibility with auxiliaries is the verb “poder”

b) The addressee made prominent: this second possibility includes most cases of what Ervin-Tripp (1976) calls 'question directives': 'Could you open the window please?'. 'Can' but not 'may' can introduce requests of this type in English. Imperative requests fall into this category, although the subject “you” is hardly ever made explicit.

c) Both the speaker and the addressee made prominent: Although the above appear to be the most frequent means of performing common, everyday requests, there are also interesting ways in which both the speaker and the addressee can occupy the prominent position: 'Can we clear up the mess?

Besides the cases in which such constructions are used to request the addressee's help, they may also be employed to indicate either “you” or “me”. Brown and Levinson (1978: 132) have pointed out that this phenomenon is found in both Tamil and Tzeltal, as well as in English, where ' let's' can also function in this way. We can also add that the same applies to Spanish:

Let's have a cookie, then (i.e. me) Let's get on with dinner, eh? (i.e. you or you and me).

d) The action made prominent, which is achieved mainly through impersonalization or passivization. Instead of requesting with “do you have...?”· or “could I have?”, languages provide ways of avoiding the I and you pronouns with expressions like “is there anything …?”· ¿hay algo para…?”. However, the most common and pervasive means of impersonalization shared by many

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unrelated languages is offered by the passive.30 What passives share with the impersonalizing constructions mentioned above is that they fulfill the speaker's need to express distance and formality, which have very often been associated with politeness. “Passives and impersonal expressions ... tend to create a sense of distance between speaker and utterance, or speaker and addressee. Hence sentences containing these forms tend to be interpreted as polite' (Lakoff 1973: 299). Likewise, Brown and Levinson (1978: 279) suggest that “impersonalization serves basic politeness ends... and the passive exists (at least partially) to serve these ends”. They also argue that the basic motive involved in English passives is to denote and possibly delete the subject. In this way the responsability is shifted off subject, which reflects politeness and formality conventions.

There is evidence that supports the assumptions that passive constructions are not so frequently used in Spanish as in English in daily encounters31. The source for this preference is closely associated with the general tendency for more directness and informality in Spanish.

3. 8. Results

3.8.1. Situational and cross-cultural variance in English and Spanish. To what extent do members of different cultures agree on the need to vary their requestive behavior according to the social situation? In this section we compare the ways two different groups of subjects (native speakers of English and Spanish) realize their requests in the five situations outlined in the questionnaire. In the first part we will be looking at the choice of request strategies made by these two groups in their realization of requests. The main issue that will concern us here is the relationship between situational and cultural factors in determining variable patterns of requestive behavior.

We have previously32 distinguished between nine different request strategies or directness levels, ranging from the use of imperatives (mood derivable) as the most direct way of making a request to the use of a "hint" as the least direct way of getting the hearer to carry out the speaker’s wishes. Here we will include the five most direct request strategies in a new category we call impositive (strategy type 1). We also conflate strategies 6 and 7 and label the new category conventionally indirect (strategy type 2), and we consider the

30 Passive serves to change word order for theme/rheme or old/new purposes. Passives also characterize

the written scientific medium as a means of formality and distance since the author is the authority, but formality rather than politeness would more appropriately describe such discourse.

31 Spanish has many other ways to express impersonality: third person plural, impersonal “se”, etc. 32 See section 3.7.

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two types of hints as one strategy type (strategy type 3), labeled hints or non-conventionally indirect.33

TABLE 1: Percentage of main Request strategies types in English and Spanish in five social situations

Situation Strategy type Spanish English S1 impositives 74,4 11,6 Kitchen conventional ind. 23,1 72,3 hints 2,5 16,1 _________________________________________________________________________ S2 impositives 10 2,1 Notes conventional ind. 90 93,9 hints 0 4,0 _________________________________________________________________________ S3 impositives 4 4,1 Ride conventional ind. 96 91,9 hints 0 4 _________________________________________________________________________ S4 impositives 77,5 26,6 Policemen conventional ind. 17,5 59 hints 5 14,4 _________________________________________________________________________ S5 impositives 36,8 4,1 Lecturer conventional ind. 60,5 91,8 hints 2,7 4,1 __________________________________________________________________________ Table 1 gives the values for the array of the three main request strategies for the two languages in five situations, in the responses by native speakers of English and Spanish respectively. The analysis of the data reveals: a) high levels of cross-cultural agreement for trends of situational variation, namely, relatively higher levels of directness are licensed in some situations than in others in both cultures; and b) cross-cultural variation in choices of directness levels within some situations, namely, cultures disagree on the specific directness level appropriate for given situations. The distribution of these strategy types in the various languages differs significantly in each of the situations at p <. 00134. Figure 1 through 3 show situational and cross-cultural

33 Blum-Kulka also undertook the formation of these three board strategy types.

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variation separately for each level of directness. In these figures, the horizontal axis depicts the situations, and the vertical axis shows the directness levels used. The values for each language are plotted on the diagrams and connected along horizontal lines.

I) In the use of impositives the following trends are depicted:

1. The use of impositives follows a similar trend across the different situations in both languages.

2. The proportion of impositives used within each situation varies with language.

In Figure 1, we see a steady rise in the proportion of impositives from the ride and notes request, through the lecturer and kitchen requests, and peaking in the policeman requests. For each of the languages, the proportion of impositives varies with the social situation. Both languages agree on the rank order of situations by the degree of directness exhibited. The lowest incidence of impositives is found in both languages in the request for a ride (4% in English versus 4.1% in Spanish) and the request for notes (2.1% vs.10%), and the highest incidence of impositives is shown in the request for cleaning the kitchen (11.6% vs. 74.4%) and in the policeman 's request to move the car (26.6% vs. 77.5%).

The degree of cross-cultural variation in the use of impositives varies within the situation. It is relatively low for the ride and notes requests, and relatively high for the lecturer, kitchen and policeman requests. While in the ride requests the overall difference across the languages does not exceed 0.1%, in the kitchen requests the proportion of impositives ranges from 11.6% in English to 74.4% in Spanish.

34 The distributions are all significantly different by chi-square analysis; analysis of variance (with mean

level directness on the scale 1-9 as dependent variable) reveals a significant effect of language for four out of the five situations.

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Figure 1: The use of Impositives in 5 Request Situations in English and Spanish

II. Conventional Indirectness

The use of conventional indirectness follows the opposite trend from that of impositives. Conventionally indirect strategies constitute the most frequently used main strategy

type in the languages examined. As Figure 2 shows, cross-cultural agreement on the situational appropriateness of conventional indirectness is especially marked in the case of the notes (90% vs. 93.9 %) and ride requests (96% vs. 91,9%). The use of conventional indirectness is also found appropriate in the case of the lecturer (60% vs. 91.8%).

Lower incidences of conventional indirectness, combined with marked cross-cultural variation in amount of use, are found in the kitchen and policeman requests: in the kitchen request, conventional indirectness ranges from 23.1 In Spanish to 72.3 in English, and in the policeman's request from 17.5%. in Spanish to 59% in English.

As with impositives, English shows the lowest degree of situational variation in the use of conventional indirectness:

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Data from “Conventional”

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Figure 2: The use of Conventional Indirectness in 5 Request Situations in English and Spanish.

III) Non-conventional Indirectness

The use of hints (nonconventional indirectness) varies across situations less than the two other main strategy types.

Figure 3 shows that the proportion of hints is relatively low in both languages and all situations, ranging only from 0% to 18%. The lowest nonconventional indirectness is found in the notes and lecturer requests (0% vs. 4% and 2.7% vs. 4.1%) and the highest incidence in the kitchen requests (2.5% vs. 16% respectively).

These results suggest that the use of hints follows a trend of its own, both situationally and cross-culturally, which is different from the trends depicted for the two main strategy types.

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This is the reason why we constructed and then administered a different questionnaire to assess nonconventional indirectness (or off-record strategies) separately from positive and negative politeness strategies. The hypothesis that off-record strategies do not form an independent category goes against Brown and Levinson, who established that those strategies, just because they are the most indirect ones, are also at the highest level in the politeness rank. Our results here suggest that off-record strategies mix with both positive and negative politeness strategies and can be interpreted in different ways.

Figure 3: The use of hints in five Request Situations in English and Spanish.

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3.8.2. Degree of cross-linguistic variation in conventional indirectness. The findings seem to prove that both languages display strategies that meet the membership criteria for inclusion in the class of conventional indirectness. Now we have to discuss the degree to which the particular manifestations of this category are similar to each other in both languages, that is, whether specific translation equivalents of conventional indirectness strategies in one language retain their pragmatic perculiarities in another, and whether conventional indirectness strategies carry similar social meanings in both languages.

In order to establish the degree of cross-linguistic equivalence and variation between the actual sub-strategies of conventional indirectness, I have reexamined the corpus of conventional indirect strategies in English and Spanish. The results of this analysis are presented in Table 2.

The request patterns presented in Table 2 are classified into two levels: the first level is sub-classified in terms of conventions of form, and the second is grouped in terms of conventions of means. The first level represents the actual strategies used in the two languages. Cases that exhibit high degrees of conventionality appear in bold. The strategies included in Table 2 were used with differing frequencies in English and Spanish. The distribution of the sub-strategies of conventional indirectness in English and Spanish is presented in Table 3.

Table 3. Rank-ordered distribution of sub-strategies of Conventional Indirectness in English and Spanish.

English % Spanish % 1. can/could 66.5 1. can/could 68.8

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2. will/would 17.7 2. prediction 14.7 3. would you mind 10.5 3. future + politeness formula 7.12 4. possibility 2.3 4. would you mind 6.08 5. how about 1.3 5. why don't you 3.22 6. why don 't you 1.7 ____________________________________________________________________ n: 520 n: 280 ____________________________________________________________________ n: number of utterances. From the results presented in the tables 2 and 3, the following cross-linguistic similarities and differences emerge:

1. All sub-strategies of conventional indirectness vary across languages to some degree in conventions of form. As a result, true pragmatic equivalence between forms is scarce.

2. Both languages differ in preferences shown for the use of specific sub-strategies; for example, the most frequently used strategies in English are "can/could you" (66.5%). "will/would you" (17.7 %) and "would you mind" (10.5 %). In Spanish, on the other hand, the distribution is " ¿ Puedes/puede...? (68.8 %), predicción (14.7 %), futuro/potencial + fórmula de cortesía (7.8 %).

3.8.2.1. Sub-strategies of Conventional Indirectness: analysis of results.

a) Reference to hearer’s ability

The only strategy which exhibits similarity across languages on all three dimensions (e .g. means, form and degree of conventionalization) is the question concerning ability:

Could you please clean up a little? Judith, ¿puedes prestarme los apuntes de la clase anterior por favor? Ability questions are the typical example of conventional indirectness. Since they

potentially maintain a balance between the literal and the requestive interpretation, they can be trusted as efficient means for achieving the requestive goal while maintaining their face-saving optionality. They have a high frequency as compared with the other sub-strategies.

b) Reference to hearer’s willingness

The procedure of reference to willingness is manifested by a variety of subtypes which differ drastically in form across both languages: In English, questioning hearer’s lack of objection (“would you mind") is a conventionalized form: Excuse me, miss, would you mind moving your car? Would you mind clearing your stuff away?

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Would you mind giving me a lift? Spanish includes utterances that refer broadly hearer’s wishes, but do not have a fixed form: ¿ Tendría inconveniente en Ilevarme: a casa? Les molestaría acercarme a casa? The major cross-linguistic variations in form within this group suggest that appeals to willingness have a lover degree of universal applicability than appeals to ability. This means that there will be variations in the requestive potential of willingness questions across both languages, resulting in a different status granted to the literal meanings. Hence, cross-linguistic equivalence is much lower in this group than in the former group.

c) Predicting hearer’s doing the act

Reference to hearer’s doing the act in the future (prediction) also takes a variation in forms in both languages:

Would you help me clean up the kitchen? Will you give me a lift? These questions concern both prediction and volition in English. Spanish uses a

question form which reflects nonobviousness of compliance (Haverkate, 1984).

d) Formulaic suggestions

Questioning reason: Suggestions made by questioning the reason for not doing something serve as requests both in English and Spanish

Why don't you clean the mess up? ¿ Por qué no limpias todo bien? All the English utterances displaying this form appeared in the "kitchen" situation,

suggesting that “why don’t you’s” are perceived as strong requests for action. It should also be noted that, at least in that situation, this sub-strategy carries with it an implication of displeasure absent from other sub-strategies of conventional indirectness.

English "how about": This type of construction appeared only in English, and it presents a borderline case in

terms of conventional indirectness. It seems that "how about" suggestions derive their requestive force more from the circumstances in which they are used than from properties of the utterance.

The analysis of the sub-strategies of conventional indirectness in English and Spanish suggests that, within each language, the sub-strategies vary on at least two levels:

1.level of conventionality of form

2. level of requestiveness (illocutionary transparency).

These two dimensions interact: the more standard, formulaic the request’s form, the higher its relative level of illocutionary transparency.

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3.8.2.2 Sub-strategies of Conventional Indirectness by Perspective Choice of perspective presents an important source of variation in requests. The four possibilities we have mentioned are often available to speakers within a single situation, though not necessarily for the same request strategy. Languages may differ, not only in their general preferences in choice of perspectives, but also in the conventionalization of perspectives within specific strategy types.

Since requests are inherently impositive, avoidance of naming the hearer as actor can reduce the form’s level of coerciveness. In the two languages examined it was found that speakers of Spanish are less influenced by considerations of perspective: 97.4 % of the Spanish conventional requests are hearer-oriented. (In English it is 61.3 %).

Another interesting aspect is that the second most preferred choice in English is speaker-oriented requests (33.4 %).

3.8.2.3. Internal modification We have defined as "internal modifiers" those peripherical elements to the request utterance proper, the presence of which is not essential for the utterance to be potentially understood as a request. Such modifiers can be multifunctional in two distinct ways. First, they may act both as indicating devices, used to signal pragmatic force, as well as socio-pragmatic devices, meant to affect the social impact the utterance is likely to have. Second, in their socio-pragmatic role, they may act either as downgraders (meant to mitigate the act) or as upgraders (that emphasize their degree of coerciveness).

For politeness purposes we are obviously more interested in downgraders. Cross-linguistic comparison of the use of downgraders reveals interesting differences

in distribution which, considered together with the results for choice of perspective, raise issues in regard to politeness.

Table 4: The proportion of downgraders in the class of conventional indirectness in English and Spanish

____________________________________________________________________ English Spanish n*= 429 n*= 280 ____________________________________________________________________ + - + - ____________________________________________________________________ 53.3 46.7 17.4 82.6 Our data show that English native speakers use nearly twice as many downgraders with conventional indirectness than the speakers of Spanish. Typical English examples are:

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Could I please borrow you notes from yesterday? The minimal use of downgrading is achieved by the addition of the politeness marker

“please”. But it is typically English to use a number of downgraders in one utterance to cause the accumulated effect of deferential politeness:

I was wondering if you could possibly present your paper next week, instead of the week after?

If we combine this finding with choice of request perspective, we find out that Spanish and English represent clear opposites: in Spanish the preference for hearer-oriented requests and more downgrading.

One way to interpret these results is to suggest that downgrading and avoidance of naming the hearer might play culturally distinct roles in contributing to politeness. For Spanish speakers, for instance, choice of perspective to show positive politeness is a more significant contributor to politeness than the amount of downgrading. Though this line of reasoning would need to be confirmed by investigations of considered together with the results for choice of perspective, raise issues in regard to politeness.

Table 4: The proportion of downgraders in the class of conventional indirectness in English and Spanish

____________________________________________________________________ English Spanish n*= 429 n = 280 ____________________________________________________________________ + - + - ____________________________________________________________________ 53.3 46.7 17.4 82.6 Our data show that English native speakers use nearly twice as many downgraders with conventional indirectness than the speakers of Spanish. Typical English examples are:

Could I please borrow your notes from yesterday? The minimal use of downgrading is achieved by the addition of the politeness marker

“please”. But it is typically English to use a number of downgraders in one utterance to cause the accumulated effect of deferential politeness:

I was wondering if you could possibly present your paper next week, instead of the week after?

If we combine this finding with choice of request perspective, we find out that Spanish and English represent clear opposites: in Spanish the preference for hearer-oriented requests

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combines with a low incidence of downgrading, while in English the reverse trend is apparent: less hearer-oriented requests and more downgrading.

One way to interpret these results is to suggest that downgrading and avoidance of naming the hearer might play culturally distinct roles in contributing to politeness. For Spanish speakers, for instance, choice of perspective to show positive politeness is a more significant contributor to politeness than the amount of downgrading. Though this line of reasoning would need to be confirmed by investigations of perceptions of politeness within each speech community, it seems to be the case that features like indirectness, modifications and perspective combine in culturally different ways to yield cross-culturally differing styles of politeness.

Perceptions of politeness within each speech community, it seems to be the case that features like indirectness, modifications and perspective combine in culturally different ways to yield cross-culturally differing styles of politeness.

3.8.3. Indirectness revisited As is evident from the previous discussion and the relevant literature, there is only limited consensus among scholars about what constitutes indirectness or directness. Brown and Levinson made a distinction in terms of "on record" negative politeness or "conventional indirectness" and "off record" or "non-conventional indirectness". Although these terms ("conventional" versus "non-conventional") have been widely used, they conceal the important fact that pragmatic indirectness can also be a conventionalized means for requesting.

Structural or conventional indirectness relies heavily on structural elaboration, mainly in the form of hedged interrogative constructions. Pragmatic or non-conventional indirectness comprises mainly "hints" which are structurally simple statements or interrogative constructions. These are usually produced when Grice's maxims of efficient communication are violated and, thus, conversational implicatures are invited in order to arrive at the intended message.

As far as politeness is concerned, off-record utterances have been attributed higher degrees of politeness on the grounds that they minimize impositions more successfully. Blum-Kulka (1987), among others, has challenged Brown and Levinson's ranking of politeness strategies suggesting that, at least for requests, politeness is associated with conventional indirectness, but not necessarily with non-conventional indirectness, leaving room for cross-cultural variation. Her basic argument is that a certain interactional balance between clarity and non-coerciveness is necessary for any utterance to count as polite . This balance is achieved in the case of structural indirectness. In the case of direct constructions, clarity overrides non-coerciveness and in the case of pragmatic indirectness non-coerciveness overrides clarity; thus, they can both be perceived as less polite than structurally indirect constructions since the necessary balance is destroyed.

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Before making or accepting claims concerning the degree of politeness encoded in indirectness universally, the cultural specificity of the phenomenon should be considered.

3.8.4. The notion of "face" in both cultures Brown and Levinson (1978: 66-67) say that, although the notion is universal, the exact content of face will differ in different cultures, and they elaborate on this by saying that there will be differences as to the exact limits to personal territories, and to the publicly relevant content of personality. Notions of face are closely related to some of "the most fundamental cultural ideas about the nature of the social persona, honour and virtue, shame and redemption and thus to religious concepts" (Brown and Levinson 1987: 13).

The notion of face, consisting of two aspects of approval and non-imposition, seems to account for the motivation of politeness phenomena in Spanish and to explain the differences between Spanish and English. I suggest that the fundamental difference between the two politeness systems can be explained in terms of differences in the significance attached to the two components of face. The English seem to place a higher value on privacy and individuality, i.e. the negative aspect of face, whereas the Spaniards seem to emphasize involvement and in-group relations, i.e. the positive aspect. For Spaniards the limits to personal territories seem to be looser among the individuals who belong to the same in-group. The barriers which will have to be removed to establish social relations are not so high and for this reason territorial intrusion is measured on a different basis. Furthermore, the notion of face among Spaniards seems to include, not only the desire of a person to be appreciated, liked and approved of by at least some others, but also a strong desire that closely related associates are also appreciated, liked, and approved of by the same. The actions of every member of the in-group are most strongly reflected in the others' face. Very often the individual’s needs, desires and expectations, and even actions are determined by considering those of the other members of the in-group. Face is not lost, maintained, or enhanced solely on the basis of how each individual behaves. The behavior of other closely related members of the in-group contributes greatly to the overall picture of every individual’s face.

Members of the same in-group will most often employ informality and positive politeness strategies and they will save formality and negative politeness (or no politeness at all) for member of the out-group, depending on their status. Towards their in-group, Spaniards behave with spontaneity and enthusiasm and tend to express their feeling overtly. Members of the same in-group see it as their duty to help and support each other, both morally and financially, so they find no obvious reason for thanking or apologizing, unless for something they conceive of as being very serious or beyond the normal duties of the performer of the action, since the appropriate response is similar behavior from everybody when the occasion arises. On the verbal level, their requests and wishes, advice and suggestions are expressed structurally more directly than in English because they are not perceived as impositions to the same extent. They prefer those patterns which involve what

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Brown and Levinson have called interactional “optimism”, such as imperatives and indicatives.

In England, on the other hand, cultural norms demand a more distant system of behavior, where helping each other is seen more as depending on the individual’s discretion rather than as conforming to a more general duty. Thus, requests are comparatively more sparingly employed, since they are perceived as impositions to a greater extent and they are preferably expressed more elaborately and indirectly. Verbalizations of thanks and apologies are imperative even for minor relevant situations and among members belonging to the same in-group. This is, I believe, a major source of misinterpretation and misjudgements which have led to negative stereotypic comments such as “the Spaniards are impolite” or "the English are hypocritical" and many others of a similar sort concerning the degrees of politeness.

3.8.5. Structural and pragmatic indirectness Spaniards tend to prefer more structurally direct requests than the English, who tend to prefer more structurally indirect constructions. For example, imperative constructions constitute appropriate requesting forms in many more contexts in Spanish than in English.

As far as pragmatic indirectness is concerned, I have no evidence about the degree of indirectness in both cultures. In an attempt to investigate this, I used a questionnaire, in which all the situations depicted involve the off-record strategy, give association clues", which violates the relevance maxim. The first interesting finding is that both the Spaniards (67.4 percent) and the English (64.3 percent) found the indirect interpretation more plausible and that they both move on a very close level of pragmatic indirectness (see Table 4). The results, although preliminary, suggest that there is a slight difference regarding preferences for pragmatic indirectness between the two societies. Moreover, independent evidence also indicates that the Spaniards tend to prefer more off-record strategies than the English. There are a number of classic off-record strategies which include rhetorical questions, ellipsis and the use of proverbs (Brown and Levinson 1978: 217). Spaniards use rhetorical questions very frequently either as responses to other questions or in order to emphasize a certain issue and achieve greater vividness.

Structural indirectness may indicate the speaker’s concern for the addressee's freedom and, consequently, the politeness encoded may be motivated by a wish to reduce the imposition involved. However, as far as pragmatic indirectness is concerned, a number of issues deserving our attention seems to be involved, extending beyond the notions of pragmatic clarity, avoidance of coerciveness, and efficiency.

First, much depends on what has been conventionalized to function as more polite or more formal in the specific context. If questions concerning the ability or willingness of the addressee to perform the act are conventionally understood as negatively polite requests, it may be argued that utterances stating reasons (Haverkate 1988) and questions concerning location can be understood as conventional requests in many contexts. It has been suggested

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that utterances expressed as hints require a lot more mental effort on the part of the addressee than embedded imperatives, which in turn require more effort than straightforward imperatives. The speaker does not choose to employ indirect expressions in order to place interpretive demand on the addressee. Conventionalization diminishes the length of the inferential process necessary for the interpretation of both structurally and pragmatically indirect constructions and contributes decisively to the balance between clarity and non-coerciveness and, thus, to the assumed degree of politeness. The difference in terms of conventionalization between structural and pragmatic indirectness is mainly that the former, unlike the latter, has been studied extensively; thus, its manifestations are overt, to a great extent typical, and readily recognizable as such. Off-record utterances, therefore, cannot be seen as more or less polite irrespective of their degree of conventionalization in the particular society.

Secondly, another important related issue is the notion of imposition which such devices are supposed to mitigate. One of Brown and Levinson's (1978: 18) basic arguments for the correctness of their hierarchy is that off-record politeness has not been found to be used for small face-threatening acts or to lower-status addressees whereas negative and positive politeness have.

However, their argument does not seem to account for the great variety of off-record utterances used in familiar and familiar contexts, at least in Spanish. One wonders in what sense the mother who says to her little son “Where are your boots?”, and implies “put them on”, is performing a serious face-threatening act and would want to be extremely polite. Or similarly, in what sense the husband who requests to be given his newspaper by “Where is your newspaper?” is superior in status to his wife or is committing a serious imposition requiring the highest degree of politeness. Simple considerations like these cast doubts on the ranking of politeness strategies and its universal validity.

It could be argued, nevertheless, that the main source of the disagreement regarding off-record requests is the assumption that they derive their politeness from minimizing impositions. Although this may be one motivation, it cannot be the only one, or even the most basic one holding for all societies and cultures. Another equally important motivation is that the addressee should be provided with the opportunity to volunteer. This double function of off-record utterances explains why both the Spaniards and the English can perform on very similar levels of pragmatic indirectness, despite their different politeness orientations. Off-record strategies do not form an independent category, but mix with both positive and negative politeness strategies and can be interpreted in different ways (Brown and Gilman, 1989). Thus, for instance, some who requests a lift from a friend with a hint like Are you going to the University tomorrow? May be either leaving the options open to the addressee because they do not want to impose or because they do not want to deprive the addressee of the pleasure of offering and indicating consideration for the speaker’s needs. In other words, in societies where the principle of distance and non-imposition

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prevail it will be essential to take all linguistic measures to ensure minimization of coerciveness. In contrast, in societies where greater importance is attached to solidarity relations and dependence, the weight of impositions is assessed differently and is considered of secondary importance. Consequently, in such cases, pragmatic indirectness will not be chosen by speakers eager to soften impositions, but by those willing to provide the addressee with the opportunity to offer without being requested. This prevents the face-threatening, inherently impolite request from occurring and at the same time paves the way for an inherently polite act, the offer.35

In short, interlocutors in negative politeness societies will probably prefer structural indirectness to indicate their distance and through this their consideration for the other person; in positive politeness societies, however, interlocutors will prefer more structurally direct configurations to indicate their closeness and through this their consideration for others. Positive and negative politeness techniques “operate, respectively, as a kind of social accelerator and social brake for decreasing or increasing social distance in relationships” (Brown and Levinson 1978: 98).

Pragmatic indirectness, on the other hand, can characterize both types of society. This is possible because, as Brown and Levinson (1987: 213) suggest, many off-record strategies when used in context acquire on-record explicitness, and consequently their manifestations can be either positively or negatively polite. Furthermore, socio-cultural norms inform the context and determine the functions to be performed by particular constructions.

From what has been said so far, it is not unreasonable to assume that the English use pragmatic indirectness as a strategy which enables speakers to give options to addressees to interpret the utterance in the way they wish, and yet reserve the right to deny the addressee's interpretation if that endangers their own face. In other words, it protects both the speakers and the addressee's negative face. In contrast, Spaniards use pragmatic indirectness as a strategy by which the speaker expresses rapport with the addressee, a rapport which recognizes each other’s needs and the desire to satisfy them. In other words, it enhances both the speaker’s and the addressee's positive face.

3.8.6. Length of the responses. In both parts of the study, with English and Spanish native speakers, when comparing the oral and written responses we found that the oral responses were considerably longer. This length difference was consistent over all situations, The oral requests were an average of 12.7 words longer than the written ones.

What made the oral responses longer than the written ones? The longer requests are longer because they contain more and longer supportive moves, as well as hesitations and recyclings.

35 Brown and Levinson (1987: 72) consider both requests and offers face-threatening acts, while Leech (1983: 83) views offers as inherently polite in contrast to request and orders.

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The following requests from our data are responses to the situation described earlier in which a student asks another student if he can borrow her notes from a class he missed. The responses below exemplify this length difference:

(Utter. 123, written) Can I borrow your notes, please, (6 words) (Utter. 126, written) Would you mind if I borrow your notes? (Utter. 302, oral) Hi. My name is Jack, and yesterday I couldn’t come to class ‘cause I

was sick, so I was wondering if you could lend me your notes from yesterday so I can copy them down to keep track on the class. I will give them to you as soon as I can (52 words)

(Utter. 301, oral) Judy, do you know I have some problems and I missed my class? I don’t know, can you do me a favour? Can I borrow your notes and I bring them over to you tomorrow? (33 words).

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Appendix I

Questionnaire On The Definition Of Politeness I would very much appreciate you help with my research. Could you please fill in the blanks or put an X in the appropriate place in the following: Age: 18-25 26-40 41-60 Sex: F M Place of birth : Place of residence: How many years have you lived there? up to 2 3-10 over 10 Occupation: Foreign languages you know very well: Questions: 1. Could you please write in the space provided below what the word 'politeness' means to you, and what you consider to be the characteristics of a polite person? 2. Please give an example of behavior which impresses you as being polite. 3. Please give an example of behavior which impresses you as being impolite. 4. How could you characterize English people in general? (Please tick the answer which for you is the most appropriate). a. very polite b. fairly polite c. not polite 5. Add any comments you consider relevant to this questionnaire. I would very much appreciate your help research. Could you please fill in the blanks or put an X in the appropriate box in the following? Age: 18-25 26-40 41-60 Sex: M F Place of birth : Place of residence: How many years have you lived there? up to 2 3-10 over 10 Education: E. School Yes No High School Yes No University Yes No Occupation: Foreign languages you know very well:

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Would you now read the following situations carefully and then fill in the missing parts of the dialogues. The length of the answer is not important; what is important is to be natural using responses you have employed in relevant real-life situations. If you have any comments or wish to make additional qualifications, would you please write them in the space provided on the last page? Thank you.

Questionnaire Of Requests

Situation 1: You are at a close friend's house. Her name is Kate. You did not have lunch and you feel very hungry. You: You know something, Kate. I didn't have time to have lunch; _______________ ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Kate: Oh yes. There is still some food left over. What would you like? Situation 2 You need a computer and you know that one of your superiors (boss, manager, teacher) has got it, so you decide to go to his/her office and ask for it. You: Excuse me, but need a computer. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Superior: Yes, of course, but I shall be needing it myself tomorrow. Situation 3 You missed a lecture or talk you were very interested in, you want to get some notes from a fellow student/partner. You: I missed yesterday's lecture on AIDS. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Jane: Yes, of course. You can borrow them whenever you like. Situation 4 You are applying for a job advertised in a newspaper. You phone the firm for further information on the job. You: I am interested in applying for the job you advertised in the paper last Sunday.

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________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Public relations officer: Yes, of course; give me your address and I’ll have some additional information sent to you. Situation 5 You want to borrow a car from one of your brothers; you need one desperately. You: I need your car this afternoon, because mine has broken down ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Brother: That is O.K. I do not need it this afternoon. Situation 6 One of your colleagues at work is going out to do some shopping. You would like her to pick for you two magazines that have just come out. You: I tried to get "Time Out" and "TV Times" this morning, but they don't come out till this afternoon; ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Colleague: Yes; is there anything else you want? Situation 7 It is 11 p.m., and you are about to go to sleep. Your neighbors next door are having a party and are making a lot of noise. You: Excuse me, ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Neighbor: Sorry about that. Questionnaire On Indirect Requests Select one of the choices given (a or b) that corresponds more closely to the meaning of the italized utterance given in every situation. Situation 1. Between a couple: Husband: Do you know where today's paper is?

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a. The husband wants to know where today's paper was last seen. b. The husband is actually asking to be given the paper. Situation 2. Father and son watching TV. The doorbell rings. Father: Can you open the door? Son: O.K. a. Father is asking his son to open the door. b. Father is asking his son whether he is able to open the door Situation 3. Two colleagues (A and B) are talking. A usually (but not always) gives B a lift to the University. In the course of their conversation, B says: B: Are you going to the University tomorrow? a. B is asking just out of friendly interest. b. B is asking because she wants to be given a lift. Situation 4. A student wishes to work with some of the material her Professor has in her office. Because of his academic schedule he needs to work there outside the regular hours. Student: I was wondering if there is any chance of me getting in here to go through those materials after hours like on a weekend? a. The student is asking for a key to get into the room. b. The student is asking the Professor to work extra hours. Situation 5. Mother to her son, who is watching a movie on TV. Mother: Haven't you seen it at least twice? Son : O.K. I'm going to do my homework now. a. Mother is proving she has got a good memory. b. Mother is asking her son to stop watching TV.

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Appendix 2

Part A: Constructing a discourse completion test

The data in this experimental study was elicited by means of a discourse completion test. The test is designed to elicit the realization of specific speech acts; each item consists of a brief description of a situation and a scripted dialogue from which one turn has been omitted. Respondents are asked to fill in the missing turn, thereby providing the speech act aimed at. In the performing of such a test the following point should be considered:

1. contextualization of the speech act to be elicited.

The description preceding the dialogue for each item specifies the setting and the role relationship between the participants, and provides the necessary context for the realization of the speech act.

2. manipulation of external and internal contextual features

External contextual features of the interaction include the social role relationship between the participants, such as their relative social distance and relative social dominance against each other. These variables can be incorporated into the description of the situation, and varied systematically across items.

Internal contextual features include the parameters specific to the speech act elicited, such as the type of goal for requests.

3. cultural transposition

If the discourse completion test is to be used in different cultures and languages, it needs to be adapted to the respective linguistic and cultural norms.

Part B: Coding instructions Requests 1. Segmentation Identification of Head Act. A Head Act is the minimal unit which can realize a request; it is the core of the request sequence: John, get me a beer, please. I’m terribly thirsty. In order to isolate the Head Act one has to discard those parts of the sequence that are not essential for realizing the request. Two peripherical elements Alerters and Supportive Moves. 2 Coding Categories An Alerter is an element whose function is to alert the hearer’s attention to the ensuing speech act:

a) Title/role:

Professor/waiter

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Señor Professor/camarero

b) Surname:

Johnson/Fernández

c) First name:

Judith/Susana

d) Nickname:

Judy/Susy

e) Endearment term:

Honey/cariño

f) Offensive term:

Stupid cow

g) Pronouns: you, tú/usted

h) Attention getter:

Hey, excuse me, listen.

Eh!, oiga,oye,

Request perspective A request can be realized from the viewpoint of the Hearer, the Speaker or both participant, or any explicit mentioning of the participants can be avoided a) Hearer dominance: Could you tidy up the room? ¿Puedes arreglar la habitación? b) Speaker dominance: Do you think I could borrow your notes from yesterday?/ ¿Puedo llamarte de tú? c) Speaker and hearer dominance: Could we begin now? ¿Podemos empezar ya? d) Impersonal (using people, they, one, and their translation equivalents as neutral agents or passivization): Can one ask for a little quiet? Un poco de silencio, ipor favor! Request strategy A Request strategy is the obligatory choice of the level of directness by which the Request is realized. By directness is meant the degree to which the speaker’s illocutionary intent is apparent from the locution. Directness in this sense is a pragma-linguistic category which lends itself to psycholinguistic validation. It is related to, but by no means coextensive with,

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politeness. The Request strategies below are ordered according to decreasing degrees of directness. They are mutually exclusive; i.e. a Head Act can only be realized through one specific Request strategy: a) Mood derivable. The grammatical mood of the locution conventionally determines its illocutionary force as a Request. The prototypical form is the imperative. However, functional equivalents such as infinitive forms and elliptical sentence structures express the same directness level: Leave me alone/Please move your car/No smoking in the lavatories please/Could I have the menu please? Déjame en paz/Circule por favor/ Prohibido fumar en los servicios/La carta, por favor. b) Explicit performative. The illocutionary intent is explicitly named by the speaker by using a relevant illocutionary verb. I am asking you to move your car. Te pido que muevas el coche. c) Hedged performative. The illocutionary verb denoting the requestive intent is modified, e.g., by modal verbs or verbs expressing intention. I must/have to ask you to clean the kitchen right now. Debo pedirte que limpies la cocina ahora mismo. I’d like to ask you to present the paper a week earlier Quisiera perdirte que presentes el trabajo una semana antes d) Want statement: The utterance expresses the speaker’s desire that the event denoted in the proposition come about. I’d like to borrow your notes for a while. Quisiera perdirte los apuntes durante un tiempo. e) Suggestory formula; The illocutionary intent is phrased as a suggestion by means of a framing routine formula. How about cleaning up the kitchen? Why don't we clean up the kitchen? ¿ Por qué no limpiamos la cocina? f) Preparatory: The utterance contains a reference to a preparatory condition for the feasability of the Request, typically one of ability, willingness, or possibility, as conventionalized in the given language. Can I borrow your notes? ¿ Puedo pedirte prestados los apuntes. g) Strong hint: The illocutionary intent is not immediately derivable from the locution; however, the locution refers to relevant elements of the intended illocutionary and/or propositional act. Unlike the Preparatory Request strategy, hints are not conventionalized and thus require nore inferencing activity on the part of the hearer. Will you be going home now?

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¿ Vas a casa ahora? h) Mild hint: The locution contains no elements which are of immediate relevance to the intended illocution or proposition, thus putting increased demand for context analysis and knowledge activation on the interlocutor.

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Appendix 3

Cuestionaro Sobre La Definicion De Cortesia Agradecería tu ayuda en mi investigación. ¿ Quieres rellenar los espacios en blanco o poner una X en los lugares apropiados de los apartados que siguen: Edad 18-25 26-40 41-60 Sexo F M Lugar de nacimiento: Lugar de residencia: ¿ Cuántos años ha vivido allí?? hasta 2 3-10 más de 10 Ocupación: Lenguas extranjeras que conocen muy bien: Preguntas: 1. ¿Puede describir en el espacio de abajo lo que significa la palabra "cortesía" y cuáles son lasa características de una persona cortés) 2. Dé una muestra de comportamiento que usted considera cortés. 3. Dé un ejemplo de comportamiento que le ha impresionado como descortés. 4. ¿Cómo caracterizaría a los españoles en general? (Marque por favor la respuesta que le parezca más apropiada). a. muy corteses b. bastante corteses c. descorteses 5. Añada cualquier comentario que considere relevante para este cuestionario. Agradecería tu ayuda en mi investigación. ¿Quieres rellenar los espacios en blanco o poner una X en los lugares apropiados de los apartados que siguen: Edad 18-25 26-40 41-60 Sexo F M Lugar de nacimiento: Lugar de residencia: ¿Cuántos años ha vivido allí?? Hasta 2 3-10 más de 10 Ocupación: Lenguas extranjeras que conocen muy bien: Lea a continuación las siguientes situaciones cuidadosa mente y rellene las partes en blanco de los diálogos. La longitude de la respuesta no es lo que importa. Lo que importa es ser natural en la contestación, usando las respuestas que usted daría en las situaciones de la vida

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real. Si tiene algún comentario que hacer o desea añadir algo, hagalo en el espacio de la última página. Gracias. Cuestionario Sobre Los Ruegos Situación 1: Estàs en casa de un amigo íntimo. Se llama Ana. No has comido y te sientes muy hambriento. Tú: ¿Sabes 10 qua ocurre, Ana? No he tenido tiempo para comer hoy._____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Ana: No te preocupes. Tengo todavía comida en la nevera. ¿Que querrás? Situación 2 En un momento dado necesitas un ordenador, y sabes que uno de tus superiores (el jefe, director o profesor) tiene uno. Por eso, decides ir a su oficina y pedírselo. Tú: Perdone, pero necasito un ordenador. ¿Puede prestarme el suyo? ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Superior: Sí, por supuesto, pero lo necesitaré mañana. Situacíon 3 Ayer te perdiste una clase o una charla por la que tenía mucho interés. Por eso, le pides las notas a un colega o amigo de clase. Tú: Ayer me perdí la clase sobre el SIDA¿ Puedes prestarme tus apuntes? ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Juana: Sí, por supuesto, te los prestaré cuando quieras. Situacíon 4 Estás solicitando un empleo que ha aparecido en la prensa. Y telefoneas a la empresa para conseguir más información sobre el mismo. Tú: Estoy interesado en solicitar el puesto anunclado en el periódico el pasado domingo ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

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____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Relaclones públicas: Sí, por supuesto; déme su dirección y le enviaré información adicional. Situación 5 Necesitas un coche desesperadamente. Se lo pides prestado a uno de tus hermanos. Tú: Necesilo tu coche esta tarde, porque el mío se ha averiado. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Hermano: De acuerdo. No lo necesito esta tarde. Situación 6 Uno de tus compañeros de trabajo va a hacer unas compras, y te gustaría que te recogiera dos revistas que acaban de aparecer. Tú: He intentado comprar “Tiempo” esta “Tribuna”· esta mañana pero me han dicho que aparecían por la tarde. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Colega: Sí ¿ Quieres algo más? Situación 7 Son las II de la noche y estás. Tus vecinos de al lado están una fiesta y están haciendo mucho ruido. Tú: Perdóneme, pero ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Vecino: Lo siento mucho. Cuestionario Sobre Ruegos Indirectos Seleccione una de las opciones dadas (a o b) que corresponda más al significado de la expresión escrita que se ofrece para situación: Situación 1.

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Diálogo entre los componente de una pareja: Marido: ¿Sabes dónde esta el periódico de hoy? a. El marido quiere saber dónde fue visto por última vez el periódico del día. b. El marido está de hecho pidiendo que le dé el periódico. Situacíon 2. El padre y el hijo están viendo la televisión. Suena el timbre de la puerta. Padre: ¿Puedes abrir la puerta? Hijo: O.K. a. El padre le pide al hijo que abra lapuerta. b. El padre le pregunta a su hijo si es capaz de abrir la puerta. Situacíon 3. Dos colegas (A y B) están hablando. A generalmente (pero no siempre) lleva a B en coche a la Universidad. En the curso de la corversación B dice: B: ¿Vas a ir a la Universidad mañana? a. B le pregunta a A sólo por mostrar un amistoso interés. b. B le pregunta porque quiere que lo lleve a la Universidad. Situacíon 4 Un estudiante desea trabajar con una serie de materials que el profesor tiene en su despacho. A causa del horario académico del profesor, tiene que trabajar allí en horas fuera del horario regular. Estudiante: Me pregunto si hay alguna posibilidad de que pueda utilizar esos materiales fuera del horario normal, en un fin de semana, por ejemplo? a. El estudiante le está pidiendo una llave del despacho para trabajar allí. b. El estudiante le está pidiendo al profesor que trabaje horas extra. Situacíon 5 La madre a su hijo que está viendo la televisión Madre: ¿ No has visto esa película al menos dos veces ya? Hijo: De acuerdo. Ahora voy a hacer lo deberes a. La madre está demostrando que tiene buena memoria. b. La madre le está pidiendo a su hijo que de ver la television.

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