Gender and politeness : spanish and british undergraduates percepcion of appropriate requests

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The cross-cultural pragmatics literature has paid considerable attention to the various strategies that speakers deploy when performing the speech act of requesting. This is because the degree of imposition that making a request places upon one's interlocutor(s) has been seen to be subject to cross-gender and cross-linguistic/cultural variation in terms of use and interpretation. To our knowledge, however, there are virtually no contrastive studies on Peninsular Spanish and British English within this field. Wanting to address this, and whilst acknowledging the limitations of discourse completion tests (DCTs), we employed one such test as a suitable tool for obtaining a large amount of data from male and female Spanish and British undergraduates (aged 19-25). The data was analyzed and treated not as authentic speech/discourse but as reflecting informants' perceptions and beliefs about appropriate linguistic behaviour in the performance of requests in different situations controlled for power and social distance. Thus, ours is a pragmatic approach that attempts to account for these perceptions and beliefs, which are included in the "assumptions about social roles, positions, rights and obligations [that] are part of the (usually unstated) background knowledge that is routinely brought to bear on the interpretation of utterances" (Cameron 1998: 445).