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A cross-cultural and intercultural investigation of request realisation strategies in Italian and British-English and the issue of how culturally-bound understandings of politeness can affect intercultural interactions
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Bartali, Valentina (2022) A cross-cultural and intercultural investigation of request realisation strategies in Italian and British-English and the issue of how culturally-bound understandings of politeness can affect intercultural interactions. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.
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Official URL: http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b3860889
Abstract
Research in the field of pragmatics has highlighted important differences in speech act realisation strategies and the perception of contextual variables across lingua-cultures. This particularly applies to requests, which are potentially face-threatening acts and important expressions of cultural behaviour, as their performance is influenced by culturally-embedded perspectives on interpersonal rights and obligations. Although some languages have been widely investigated in terms of request realisation, such as English, little research has been done on Italian, and on this language-pair. This thesis aims to address this gap, by studying request realisation strategies in Italian and British-English, in terms of Head Acts and modification, from an intracultural, cross-cultural and intercultural perspective, and the impact of (perceptions of) the sociopragmatic factors of social distance and weight of imposition of the request on participants’ strategy choice. This study employed roleplays to elicit linguistic performance preferences, follow-up retrospective interviews to unearth participants’ understandings of such variables and evaluations of linguistic behaviours, and evaluative surveys to help triangulate the interview data. The roleplay data was analysed by using a coding scheme based on Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1984), while interview data was analysed by using content analysis, and the evaluative surveys were examined by using quantitative analysis and content analysis. The findings reveal that the British-English speakers generally paid more attention to the perceived weight of requests and exhibited a preference for negative politeness strategies that avoid/reduce imposition on the hearer. Conversely, the Italian speakers were overall more influenced by social distance and oriented toward positive politeness moves that invoke the hearer’s solidarity. These cross-cultural differences were reflected in the intercultural interactions, since the Italian Ss showed they prefer more moves that invoke solidarity. Yet, the intercultural data also showed a different phenomenon, i.e. of intercultural mediation between L1 and L2 cultural phenomena by the Italian Ss.
| Item Type: | Thesis (PhD) | ||||
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| Subjects: | H Social Sciences > HM Sociology P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics P Language and Literature > PC Romance languages P Language and Literature > PE English |
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| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Pragmatics, Politeness (Linguistics), Language and culture -- Italy, Language and culture -- England, Intercultural communication | ||||
| Official Date: | March 2022 | ||||
| Dates: |
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| Institution: | University of Warwick | ||||
| Theses Department: | Centre for Applied Linguistics | ||||
| Thesis Type: | PhD | ||||
| Publication Status: | Unpublished | ||||
| Supervisor(s)/Advisor: | Liddicoat, Anthony, 1962- ; McConachy, Troy, 1980- | ||||
| Sponsors: | European Union | ||||
| Format of File: | |||||
| Extent: | 368 pages | ||||
| Language: | eng |
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