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

Abstract

Politeness plays a key role in cross-cultural communication and intercultural 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 L1 Spanish (Hidalgo 2009; Devís 2011; Albelda 2012). However, the prosodic cues on which L1 speakers rely when judging politeness seem to be different for each language. While L1 Spanish speakers seem to rely more on intonation when judging politeness (Devís 2011), L1 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 L1 Spanish speakers do, when the only difference between the commands and requests is at the prosodic level. Chinese immigrants (N = 22) and L1 Spanish speakers (N = 26) listened to and judged the degree of politeness of 20 pairs of commands and requests produced by 4 L1 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 L1 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.