Perception of L2 Spanish polite requests and impolite commands by Chinese migrant workers living in Spain

  1. Cristina Herrero
  2. Zeina Alhmoud
  3. Margarita Planelles
Revue:
Lengua y Migración = Language and Migration

ISSN: 1889-5425,  2660-7166

Année de publication: 2020

Volumen: 12

Número: 2

Pages: 65-85

Type: Article

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D'autres publications dans: Lengua y Migración = Language and Migration

Résumé

Politeness plays a key role in cross-cultural communication and Íntercultural adaptation (Spencer-Oatey and Franklin 2009). Therefore, knowledge about (im)politeness and the acquisition of politeness strategies is central in the integration of immigrants and the achievement of social cohesion. At the same time, prosody is already known to directly affect politeness judgements in all studied languages, including Ll Spanish (Hidalgo 2009; Devís 2011; Albelda 2012). However, the prosodic cues on which L 1 speakers rely when judging politeness seem to be different for each language. While Ll Spanish speakers seem to rely more on intonation when judging politeness (Devís 2011), Ll Chinese speakers tend to rely more on other prosodic cues when judging politeness in Chinese (Fan and Gu 2016). This study investigates whether Chinese immigrants in Spain perceive the difference between polite requests and impolite commands the same way Ll Spanish speakers do, when the only difference between the commands and requests is at the prosodic level. Chinese immigrants (N = 22) and Ll Spanish speakers (N = 26) listened to and judged the degree of politeness of 20 pairs of commands and requests produced by 4 Ll Spanish speakers (2 male + 2 female) from Madrid. Pairs of commands and requests had the same lexico-grammatical features and only differed at the prosodic and pragmatic levels. Statistical analysis revealed that while commands were perceived very similarly by Chinese immigrants and Ll Spanish speakers, Chinese speakers had problems perceiving the intention in polite requests, which were rated as more polite by Spanish native speakers than by Chinese immigrants.

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This work was supported by research grant INMMIGRA2_CM [H2015/HUM-3404], and INMIGRA3-CM [H2019/HUM-5772] funded by the Autonomous Community of Madrid and the European Community and FPI doctoral fellowship from Universidad Nebrija, aswell as the EMILIA[FFI2017-83166C2-2-R] project. We would also like to thank Jon Andoni Dufiabeitia for his helpful suggestions and numerous useful comments.

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