Canceling Last Minute in Italian and Colombian Spanish: A Cross-Cultural Account of Pragmalinguistic Strategies

Abstract

This study is part of a larger research project aiming to gather and compare last-minute cancellations in different languages. The corpus, collected through an online DCT, is being annotated with NVivo software according to a set of pragmatic categories. These are derived from previous cross-cultural studies (Blum-Kulka et al. in Cross-cultural pragmatics: requests and apologies, Ablex, Norwood, 1989; Beebe et al. in Developing communicative competence in a second language, Newbury House, New York, 1990) and integrated with new ones identified in the corpus, following a data-driven approach. Declining an invitation poses a threat to the invitee’s positive face, because it shows noncompliance with the inviter’s desire to share time and friendship with the invitee. A last-minute cancellation is potentially threatening for negative face, as it interferes with the inviter’s plans, but it may save positive face because the invitee attributes her/his absence to an unforeseen and unavoidable circumstance. Little research has been devoted to both Italian and Colombian Spanish from a cross-cultural pragmatic perspective, whereas other varieties of Spanish have received more attention in this regard (see Garcia and Placencia 2007). The present study aims to fill this gap by exploring the pragmalinguistic strategies Italians and Colombians consider appropriate to use when canceling last minute. Frequency and distribution of speech act components and internal modifiers were compared between Colombian and Italian native speakers’ last-minute cancellations (n = 753). The significance of the observed differences was assessed by Chi squared test. Results show interesting differences at the pragmalinguistic level, suggesting that Italians prefer more complex and mitigated last-minute cancellations in comparison to Colombians.