Perception of L2 Spanish polite requests and impolite commands by Chinese migrant workers living in Spain
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.37536/LYM.12.2.2020.1026Keywords:
L2 Spanish, politeness, perception, immigrants, requests, commands, pronunciation, intonation, prosodyAbstract
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.
Downloads
References
Adserà, Alícia and Mariola Pytliková. 2016. “Language and migration.” In: The Palgrave
handbook of economics and language, Victor Ginsburgh and Shlomo Weber (eds.),
-372. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ambady, Nalini., Jasoon Koo, Fiona Lee, and Robert Rosenthal. 1996. “More than words:
Linguistic and nonlinguistic politeness in two cultures”. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 70:5. 996.
Albelda, Marta. 2012. “Recursos fónicos descorteses: datos acústicos y metodología para su
identificación”. In: Miradas interdisciplinares a los fenómenos de cortesía y descortesía en
el mundo hispánico, Escamilla and Vega (eds.), 520-544. Barranquilla/Estocolmo:
Universidad de Atlántico.
Aliaga-García, Cristina and Joan C. Mora. 2009. “Assessing the effects of phonetic training
on L2 sound perception and production”. In: Recent research in second language
phonetics/phonology: Perception and production, Watkins, Rauber and Baptista
(eds.), 2-31. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Álvarez, Alexandra and María Alejandra Blondet. 2003. “Cortesía y prosodia: un estudio
de la frase cortés en el español de Mérida: Venezuela”. In: La tonía. Dimensiones fonéticas
y fonológicas, Martín Butragueño and Herrera (eds.), 319-330. México: El
Colegio de México.
Astruc, Lluïsa and Maria del Mar Vanrell. 2016. “Intonational phonology and politeness
in L1 and L2 Spanish”. Probus, 28:1. 91-118.
Astruc, Lluïsa, María del Mar Vanrell and Pilar Prieto. 2016. “Cost of the action and social
distance affect the selection of question intonation in Catalan”. In: Interdisciplinary
approaches to intonational grammar in IberoRomance, Armstrong, Henriksen and
Vanrell (eds.), 93–114. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Baditzné Pálvölgyi, Kata. (2012): “Spanish Intonation of hungarian learners of Spanish:
yes-or-no questions”. Phd dissertation. University of Eötvös Loránd: Budapest.
Baker, Wendy and Pavel Trofimovich. 2006. “Perceptual paths to accurate production of
L2 vowels: The role of individual differences”. IRAL–International Review of
Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 44:3. 231-250.
Beacco, Jean-Claude, David Little and Chris Hedges. 2014. Linguistic integration of adult
migrants: Guide to policy development and implementation. Council of Europe.
Best, Catherine T., and Michael D. Tyler. 2007. “Nonnative and second-language speech
perception: Commonalities and complementarities”. Language experience in second
language speech learning: In honor of James Emil Flege, 1334. 1-47. 81
Best, Catherine. T. 2019. “The diversity of tone languages and the roles of pitch variation
in non-tone languages: Considerations for tone perception research”. Frontiers in
Psychology, 10, e00364.
Blanco, Ana. 2016. “La influencia de la lengua materna en la percepción fónica del español/
L2”. Loquens, 3: 1. e028.
Blanco, Ana. 2017. “Habilidades de percepción fónica en español/L2 y su relación con el
nivel de dominio lingüístico”. Estudios de Lingüística Aplicada, 65. 59-82.
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana and Elite Olshtain, E. 1984. “Requests and apologies: A cross-cultural
study of speech act realization patterns (CCSARP)”. Applied linguistics, 5(3), 196-213.
Borràs-Comes, Joan, Rafèu Sichel-Bazin and Pilar Prieto, P. 2015. “Vocative intonation
preferences are sensitive to politeness factors”. Language and Speech, 58(1), 68–83.
Bradlow, Ann. Reiko Akahane-Yamada, David B. Pisoni and Yoh´ichi Tohkura. 1997.
“Training Japanese listeners to identify English/r/and/l: IV. Some effects of perceptual
learning on speech production”. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,
:4. 2299-2310.
Briz, Antonio and Antonio Hidalgo. 2008. “Marcadores discursivos y prosodia: observaciones
sobre su papel modalizador atenuante”. In: Cortesía y conversación: de lo escrito
a lo oral, Antonio Briz, Antonio Hidalgo, Marta Albelda, Josefa Contreras and
Nieves Hernández Flores (eds.), 390-409. Valencia: Universidad de Valencia,
Programa EDICE.
Brown, Penelope and Stephen Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some universals in language
usage (Vol. 4). Cambridge university press.
Brown, Lucien and Pilar Prieto. 2017. “(Im)politeness: Prosody and gesture”. In: M.
Haugh, D. Kádár, & J. Culpeper (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic politeness.
New York, 357-379: Palgrave.
Brown, Lucien, Bodo Winter, Kaori Idemaru and Sven Grawunder. 2014. “Phonetics and
Politeness: Perceiving Korean Honorific and Non-Honorific Speech Through
Phonetic Cues”. Journal of Pragmatics 66: 45–60.
Brown, Lucien, Bodo Winter, Kaori Idemaru and Sven Grawunder. 2015. “The sound of
honorific language: How speech indexes social meaning in Korean, Japanese, German
and Russian”. Paper presented at the International Pragmatics Conference (IPrA),
Antwerp, Belgium.
Brunet, Paul, Roderick Cowie, Hastings Donnan and Ellen Douglas-Cowie, E. 2012.
“Politeness and social signals”. Cognitive processing, 13(2), 447-453.
Caballero, Jonathan, Nikos Vergis, Xiaoming Jiang and Marc D. Pell. 2018. “The sound
of im/politeness”. Speech Communication, 102, 39–53.
Cantero, Francisco José and Empar Devís. (in press). “Análisis melódico del español
hablado por italianos”. XXVI CILPR. Congrès International de Lingüistique et de
Philologies Romanes. Valencia. 2010.
Chen, Aoju, Carlos Gussenhoven and Toni Rietveld. 2004. “Language-specificity in the perception
of paralinguistic intonational meaning”. Language and Speech, 47(4), 311-349.
Cortés, Maximiano. M. 1997. “Sobre la percepción y adquisición de la entonación española
por parte de hablantes nativos de chino”. Estudios de fonética experimental, 9. 67-134.
Culpeper, Jonathan. 2005. “Impoliteness and entertainment in the television quiz show:
The Weakest Link”. Journal of Politeness Research, 1(1), 35–72.
Culpeper, Jonathan. 2011. “It’s not what you said, it’s how you said it!: Prosody and
impoliteness”. In L. P. R. Group (Ed.). Discursive approaches to politeness (Vol. 8,
–83). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Culpeper, Jonathan, Derek Bousfield and Anne Wichmann, 2003. “Impoliteness revisited:
With special reference to dynamic and prosodic aspects”. Journal of Pragmatics,
(10–11), 1545–1579.
Culpeper, Jonathan, Michael Haugh and Valeria Sinkeviciute. 2017. “(Im) politeness and
mixed messages”. In: The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im) politeness (pp. 323-
355). Palgrave Macmillan, London.
Devís, Empar. 2011. “La entonación de (des)cortesía en el español coloquial”, Phonica, 7,
-79.
Devís, Empar. 2014. “Del análisis melódico a la didáctica de la entonación cortés”.
Phonica, 9-10. 64-68.
Devís, Empar. 2017. “Entonación de cortesía involuntaria en el español hablado por brasileños”.
Phonica, 13. 18-31.
Devís, Empar and Marta Bartolí. 2014. “El aprendizaje de la entonación (des) cortés en
español lengua extranjera (ELE)”. Porta Linguarum: revista internacional de didáctica
de las lenguas extranjeras, 21, 245-264.
Devís, E., Francisco José Cantero and Aline Fonseca. 2017. “La competencia estratégica y cultural
en el aprendizaje de la entonación de (des)cortesía del español por parte de brasileños”.
Delta: Documentação de Estudos em Lingüística Teórica e Aplicada, 33(4), 1039-1058.
Fan, Ping and Wentao Gu. 2016. “Prosodic cues in polite and rude Mandarin speech”. In:
10th International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing
(ISCSLP), IEEE (eds.), 1-4.
Flege, James. E. 1995. “Second language speech learning: Theory, findings, and problems”.
Speech perception and linguistic experience: Issues in cross-language research, 92, 233-277.
Fonseca, Aline and Francisco José Cantero. 2011. “Características da entonação do español
falado por brasileiros”, Actas do VII congresso internacional da ABRALIN,
Curitiba., 84-98.
Fonseca, Aline. 2014. “Características de la entonación del español hablado por brasileños”.
Phonica, 9-10. 69-76.
Frota, Sonia, Gorka Elordieta and Pilar Prieto (eds.). 2011. Prosodic categories:
Production, perception and comprehension. Springer.
Gu, Wentao, Ting Zhang, and Hiroya Fujisaki. 2011. “Prosodic analysis and perception
of Mandarin utterances conveying attitudes”. In: Twelfth Annual Conference of the
International Speech Communication Association. Firenze, Italy, 1069-1072.
Gussenhoven, Carlos. 2004. The phonology of tone and intonation. Cambridge University
Press.
Harada, Yoko. 1996. “Judgements of Politeness in L2 Acquisition”. Kansas Working
Papers in Linguistics, 21, 39-56.
Havertake, Henk. 1994. “La cortesía verbal”. Estudio pragmalingüístico, Madrid, Gredos, 11-49.
Hidalgo, Antonio. 2009. “Modalización (des)cortés y prosodia: estado de la cuestión en el
ámbito hispánico”. Boletín de Filología, XLIV:1. 161–195.
Hidalgo, Antonio and Adrián Cabedo Nebot. 2014. “On the Importance of the Prosodic
Component in the Expression of Linguistic Im/politeness”. Journal of Politeness
Research, 10:1. 5–27.
Huang, Yongliang. 2008. “Politeness Principle in Cross-Culture Communication”.
English Language Teaching, 1:1. 96-101.
Hübscher, Iris, Joan Borràs and Pilar Prieto. 2017. “Prosodic Cues of Politeness in
Catalan Requests”. Journal of Phonetics.
Idemaru, Kaori, Lucien Brown, and Bodo Winter. 2015. “The Role of Pitch in Perceiving
Politeness in Korean”. Paper Presented at International Conference of Phonetic
Sciences, Glasgow, August 2015.
Iruela, Agustín. 2004. “Adquisición y enseñanza de la pronunciación en lenguas extranjeras”.
PhD diss., Universidad de Barcelona.
Isbell, Daniel Richard. 2016. “The Perception-Production Link in L2 Phonology”. MSU
Working Papers in Second Language Studies, 7. 57-67.
Ito, Mika. 2004. “Politeness and voice quality. The alternative method to measure aspiration
noise”. Proceedings of 2nd international conference on Speech Prosody, Nara,
Japan, 213-216.
Izadi, Ahmad. 2015. “Persian honorifics and im/politeness as social practice”. Journal of
Pragmatics, 85, 81-91.
Kecskes, I. 2015. “Intercultural impoliteness”. Journal of
Pragmatics, 86, 43-47. 83
Kissling, Elizabeth. M. 2014. “What predicts the effectiveness of foreign-language pronunciation
instruction? Investigating the role of perception and other individual differences”.
Canadian Modern Language Review, 70:4. 532-558.
Kitao, Kenji. 1990. “A Study of Japanese and American Perceptions of Politeness in
Requests”. Doshisha Studies in English, 50. 178-210.
Krulatz, Anna. 2015. “Judgments of Politeness in Russian: How Non-Native Requests Are
Perceived by Native Speakers”. Intercultural Communication Studies, 24:1. 103-122.
Lakoff, Robin. 1977. “What you can do with words: Politeness, pragmatics and performatives”.
In: Proceedings of the Texas conference on performatives, presuppositions and
implicatures, Rogers, Wall and Murphy (eds.) 79-106.
Leech, Geoffrey N. 2014. The pragmatics of politeness. Oxford University Press, USA.
Lin, Hsin-Yi, Kwock-Ping John Tse and Janice Fon. 2006. “An Acoustic Study on the
Paralinguistic Prosody in the Politeness Talk in Taiwan Mandarin”.In Proceedings
from ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Experimental Linguistics. Athens.
Liu, Yen Hui. 2005. “La entonación del español hablado por taiwaneses”. Phd dissertation.
Universitat de Barcelona.
McKinnon, Sean and Pilar Prieto. 2014. “The Role of Prosody and Gesture in the
Perception of Mock Impoliteness”. Journal of Politeness Research 10 (2): 185–219.
Miura, Aika. 2017. “Assessing politeness of requestive speech acts produced by Japanese
learners of English in a spoken corpus”. Language Value, 9, 184−217.
Mugford, Gerrard. 2007. “How rude! Teaching impoliteness in the second-language classroom”.
ELT journal, 62(4), 375-384.
Nadeu, Marianna and Pilar Prieto. 2011. “Pitch range, gestural information, and perceived
politeness in Catalan”. Journal of pragmatics, 43(3), 841-854.
Niebuhr, Oliver and Alexis Michaud. 2015. “Speech data acquisition: The underestimated
challenge”. KALIPHO – Kieler Arbeiten zur Linguistik und Phonetik 3. 1–42.
Ofuka, Etsuko, Denis McKeown, Mitch G. Waterman, and Peter J. Roach. 2000.
“Prosodic cues for rated politeness in Japanese speech”. Speech Communication,
(3), 199-217.
Ohala, John J. 1983. “Cross-language use of pitch: an ethological view”. Phonetica, 40(1), 1-18.
Ohara, Yumiko. 2001. “Finding one’s voice in Japanese: A study of the pitch levels of L2
users”. In: A. Pavlenko, A. Brackledge, I. Piller, & M. Teutsch-Dwyer (Eds.),
Multilingualism, second language learning, and gender (pp. 231–254). New York:
Mouton de Gruyter.
Olshtain, Elite and Shoshana Blum-Kulka. 1985. Degree of approximation: Nonnative
reactions to native speech act behavior. In: Input in second language acquisition, Gass
and Madden (eds.), 303-325. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
Orozco, Leonor. 2008. “Peticiones corteses y factores prosódicos”. In Fonología instrumental.
Patrones fónicos y variación, ed. Z.E. Herrera and P. Martín Butragueño,
–355. México: El Colegio de México.
Orozco, Leonor. 2010. “Estudio sociolingüístico de la cortesía en tratamientos y peticiones.”
Datos de Guadalajara. México, D.F.: El Colegio de México
Quilis, Antonio. 1993. Tratado de fonología y fonética españolas (Vol. 2). Madrid: Gredos.
Santamaría, Enrique Santamaría. 2007. “Enseñar prosodia en el aula: reflexiones y propuestas.
In Las destrezas orales en la enseñanza del español L2-LE”. XVII Congreso
Internacional de la Asociación del Español como lengua extranjera (ASELE): Logroño
-30 de septiembre de 2006, 1237-1250. Universidad de La Rioja.
Spencer-Oatey, Helen and Peter Franklin. 2009. Intercultural interaction: A multidisciplinary
approach to intercultural communication. Springer.
Swedberg, P. and Santiago Budria. 2015. “Education and earnings: how immigrants perform
across the earnings distribution in Spain”. Investigaciones de Economía de la
Educación, 10, 829-842.
Takahashi, Satomi. 2010. “The effect of pragmatic instruction on speech act performance”.
In:
Speech act performance: Theoretical, empirical and methodological issues, Martínez Flor
and Usó Juan (eds.), 127-144. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Tanaka, Shigenori and Saiki Kawade. 1982. “Politeness strategies and second language
acquisition”. Studies in second language acquisition, 5(1), 18-33.
Tracy, Rosemarie. 2017. Language testing in the context of migration. In The linguistic
integration of adult migrants. Some lessons from research, J.-C. Beacco, H.-J. Krumm,
D. Little, & P. Thalgott (eds.), 45–56. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Tsuji, A. 2004. “The case study of high pitch register in English and in Japanese: Does high
pitch register relate to politeness?” Seijo English Monographs, 37, 227–260.
Tsurutani, Chiharu. 2009. “Intonation of Japanese sentences spoken by English speakers”,
Interspeech 2009, 692695.
Tsurutani, Chiharu. 2010. “Foreign accent matters most when timing is wrong”,
Interspeech 2010 1854-57
Vergis, Nicos and Marc Pell. In press. “Factors in the perception of speaker politeness: the
effect of linguistic structure, imposition and prosody”, Journal of Politeness Research
Waltereit, Richard. 2005. “La polifonía prosódica: Copiar un patrón entonativo”. Revista
internacional de lingüística iberoamericana, 3(2 (6), 137-150.
Winter, Bodo and Sven Grawunder. 2012. “The phonetic profile of Korean formal and
informal speech registers”. J. Phonetics 40 (6), 808–815.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn. 2012.08.006.
Xu, Robert B. and Peggy Mok, P. 2014. “Cross-linguistic perception of Mandarin intonation”.
In Proc. Speech Prosody 2014, 638-642.
Downloads
Published
Versions
- 2021-05-06 (2)
- 2021-05-06 (1)
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2020 Lengua y migración
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.