Spanish request strategies: a cross-cultural analysis from an intercultural perspective

Abstract

Socio-cultural variables like authority, social distance, and situational setting are supposed to influence the appropriateness and effectiveness of politeness strategies used to realize directive speech acts such as requests. As the influence of these variables may differ from one culture to another, these variations are relevant factors for a person's intercultural communication competence, viewed as his capacity to communicate appropriately and effectively in a foreign language. Since deviations from native language use may have consequences for the intercultural interaction between Spanish and Dutch interlocutors, a cross-cultural research project on the use of request strategies in Spanish was carried out, in order to investigate the speech production of Spanish and Dutch speakers of Spanish. In this investigation, several differences between the two groups become manifest: it is shown that Spanish native speakers tend to use more direct strategies than Dutch nonnative speakers of Spanish. Furthermore, conventional indirectness, although the most frequently used politeness strategy by both groups of speakers, is realized in substantially different ways by Spanish speakers on the one hand, and Dutch speakers of Spanish on the other. Contrasting the results of the two parallel experiments of request production in similar situational settings, I will illustrate the types of variations that occur, and argue that some of them may have been caused by cross-linguistic differences between Spanish and Dutch.