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Pragmatics: Online-First Articles

The sociopragmatic dimension of language use and evaluations of interactional behaviour

A cross-cultural investigation of Italian and British-English speakers’ perceptions

ORCID logo | University of Wales Trinity St David
Culture can influence how people communicate and the reasons behind linguistic choices. However, the evaluative process has been mostly neglected, particularly in comparative studies. This paper aims to fill this gap. It compares how two sets of participants, Italian and British-English speakers, rated own/others’ performances in roleplays involving different request scenarios and it unpacks how their perceptions of sociopragmatic variables, such as social distance and request’s weight, influenced their evaluation process. Follow-up retrospective interviews were employed and content-analysed, to unpack participants’ evaluations. The results showed cross-cultural differences in importance, interpretation and expectations attached to different variables and underlying values.
Keywords: Italian, British-English, request strategies, evaluation of behaviour, contrastive studies, politeness
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The influence of culturally-embedded understandings of context on linguistic performance and evaluation of linguistic behaviour
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Data collection
    • 3.3Data analysis
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Divergence in importance attached to different variables
    • 4.2Divergence in interpretation of the same variables
    • 4.3Divergences in expectations underpinning the same variables
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Declaration of interest
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 November 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.23049.bar
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