Strategies of (in)directness in Spanish speakers’ production of complaints and disagreements in English and Spanish
This article presents the results of a study carried out with Spanish University
students on their use of strategies of (in)directness when expressing complaints,
disapprovals and disagreements in English and Spanish. We adopt a role-play
eliciting procedure for the collection of what a speaker thinks and what s/
he
actually says in a given situation. Our results show a tendency to mitigate the
actual words uttered with regard to the thought processes in both languages.
However, while in English students show a preference for conventional indirectness,
in Spanish there is a greater variation in the strategies employed.
Thus, mitigation, especially in Spanish, is often realised by means of the co-occurrence
of negative and positive politeness strategies across several speech
acts, thus performing complex utterances. These results point at an awareness of
students’ attempts to adapt to the model of indirectness that is assumed of the
English culture, vs. the model of directness associated to the Spanish culture.
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Cited by
Cited by 2 other publications
Maíz-Arévalo, Carmen & María-del-Carmen Méndez-García
2023.
“I would like to complain”: A study of the moves and strategies employed by Spanish EFL learners in formal complaint e-mails.
Intercultural Pragmatics 20:2
► pp. 161 ff.
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