Strong and mild requestive hints and positive-face redress in Cuban Spanish

Abstract

The study applies Blum-Kulka and House's (1989) and Kasper's (1989) categories of strong and mild hints and Brown and Levinson's (1978, 1987) classification of positive and negative politeness categories to a corpus of naturally occurring data from Cuban Spanish. It argues that the specific cultural norms of facework and face behavior in Cuban culture dictate a preferential employment of strategies aimed at positive-face redress. It concludes that there are no instances of hints performed solely with negative-politeness strategies, which are employed considerably less frequently. Therefore, hints in Cuban Spanish seem to be always either exclusively positively polite or simultaneously positively and negatively polite, but never purely deferential.