Politeness in American English and peninsular Spanish : a comparison

Abstract

Much of the previous politeness research on the English and Spanish languages has been carried out with small, feature-specific corpora. These studies have also centered mostly on how or why certain politeness characteristics are exhibited; few studies have focused on the actual frequency of linguistic-politeness utterances occurring naturally in the languages. This paper investigates how frequently American English and Peninsular Spanish speakers employ the politeness strategies presented by Brown and Levinson (1987) as evidence in two large, natural-language corpora: the MiCASE (Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English) and the CREA (Corpus de Referencia del Espanol Actual). Conventionalized, courteous phrases from the two languages, both positively and negatively polite, are represented in this study. Previous investigations have shown that Spanish-speaking societies are typically positively-polite cultures, while English-speaking cultures are usually characterized by their negatively-polite exchanges. Cross-cultural politeness research comparing Spanish and English has usually yielded the same results: English speakers are more distant and deferent than their solidarity-based Spanish-speaking counterparts. However, the outcome of this study indicates that both cultures -- Spain and the United States-- tend to employ most politeness strategies, both positive and negative, with the same frequency, at least in the case of conventionalized, polite language.