Since there is a large number of research that focuses on politeness strategies in Peninsular and Mexican Spanish (Félix-Brasdefer, 2006, Bernal Linnersand, 2007, Iglesias Recuero, 2007, Chodorowska-Pilch, 2008), and there are few focused on the Uruguayan Spanish variety (Reiter, 2000, 2002), this study investigates the politeness strategies in the Uruguayan, Mexican, and Spanish varieties and examines if there is a difference in the use of those strategies regarding the gender of the participant. To compare the strategies used in the three varieties, this study focuses on requests, which are a face-threatening act (Brown y Levinson, 1987). To collect data, two scenarios were presented in which the participants asked for favors in two different ways - one less threatening and the other more threatening (adapted from Thimm et al, 2013). In both situations the participants had to ask for a favor from another person, knowing that the other person did not mind doing them the favor, or that the favor bothers them. Five women and five men in each Spanish variety participated in the interviews. The data was analyzed according to four categories: face-saving strategies, relationship securing strategies, power strategies, and preambles. The findings suggest that among face-saving strategies softeners are the strategy most frequently observed in all speakers in all three countries. In fact, post hoc t-test revealed that softeners were significantly more frequently used than other strategies in both scenarios, t (81) = 9.16, p <.001. Among the power strategies, Mexicans tend to be more direct in their requests and use the longest preambles when compared to Uruguayans and Spaniards. Additionally, regarding gender there was no significant main effect F (1,28) = 0.89, p=0.35 indicating that women and men seem to use the same strategies to ask for a favor.

 

References

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Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage (Vol. 4). Cambridge university press.

Chodorowska-Pilch, M. (2008). Verás in Peninsular Spanish as a grammaticalized discourse marker invoking positive and negative politeness. Journal of pragmatics, 40(8), 1357-1372.

Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2006). Linguistic politeness in Mexico: Refusal strategies among male speakers of Mexican Spanish. Journal of Pragmatics, 38(12), 2158-2187.

García, C., & Placencia, M. E. (2011). Estudios de variación pragmática (sub) regional en español: visión panorámica. Dunken.

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Reiter, R. M. (2000). Linguistic politeness in Britain and Uruguay: A contrastive study of requests and apologies (Vol. 83). John Benjamins Publishing.

Reiter, R. M. (2002). A contrastive study of conventional indirectness in Spanish: Evidence from Peninsular and Uruguayan Spanish. Pragmatics, 12(2), 135-151.

Thimm, C., Koch, S. C., & Schey, S. (2003). Communicating gendered professional identity: Competence, cooperation, and conflict in the workplace. The handbook of language and gender, 528.