Linguistic politeness across Austria and Italy: Backing out of an invitation with an instant message

Abstract

The study compares how native speakers of German from the area of Innsbruck (Austria) and native speakers of Italian from the area of Rome (Italy) perceive the communicative act of backing out of an invitation for dinner at the last minute, in a situation of low social distance. The purpose of the study is twofold: to shed light on the orientation of Austrian German and Italian languages/cultures in terms of linguistic politeness, and to expand empirical cross-cultural research to a less-commonly investigated speech act. Data collected by means of a discourse completion task (DCT) are triangulated with responses to an assessment question and metapragmatic comments, and analyzed following a quantitative approach. The analysis of the DCT findings shows some cross-group differences in the choice of speech act realization strategies and internal modifiers. However, the overall results reveal more similarities than differences between the two populations regarding the informants’ perception of face threat in last-minute cancellations. This seems to disprove the idea that the two groups belong to different cultural frameworks in terms of politeness orientation, at least as far as it concerns the specific speech act under investigation.