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Directness vs indirectness: A contrastive pragmatic analysis of request

formulation

Conference Paper · December 2015

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Aurélie Marsily
Université Catholique de Louvain - UCLouvain
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 Ibero-Romance in Contact and in Contrast – Ghent 2015

Aurélie Marsily – Université catholique de Louvain

Directness vs. indirectness: A contrastive pragmatic analysis of request formulation

in Spanish and in French

Though Spanish and French are two Romance languages and therefore share
numerous linguistic characteristics, there are some notable differences between those two
languages. Spanish is a pro-drop language while French is not. However, both languages have
many features in common, such as the fact that they are T/V languages.

Blum-Kulka (1989) differentiates various types of strategies in order to formulate a

request: direct strategies, conventionally indirect strategies and unconventionally indirect
strategies. Those categories are subdivided into: mood derivables, explicit performatives,
hedged performatives, obligation statements, want statements, suggestory formulas, query
preparatories, strong hints and mild hints. Starting from this subdivision and taking into
account Hassall’s proposition (2003), I will offer a more detailed categorisation of Spanish
and French requests via a corpus-driven method. To do so, I will retrieve requests in the
Spanish corpus CORLEC and the French corpus VALIBEL and classify them into categories.
This will allow me to compare the most frequent formulations in Spanish and in French.

My hypothesis is that more direct strategies prevail in Spanish while French uses more
conventionally indirect ones or, at least, that Spanish makes more often use of imperatives
whereas French uses more the conditional mode. Indeed, various studies have demonstrated
that Spanish is a direct language (Bataller 2013). As such, it has been pointed out that the
conditional mode in Spanish is used only in formal requests, that the imperative is more used
than the conditional mode, that there is an increase in the use of tú vs. usted, especially in the
young generation (Bataller 2013) and that the Spanish culture is oriented towards a positive
politeness (Haverkate 2006). The second hypothesis is that French uses the conditional mode
more often than Spanish and that French utilizes more frequently formal address.

In this study, I expect that Spanish uses more different types of categories.
Furthermore, I will show that Spanish uses requests strategies that are not used in French,
such as infinitive imperatives.
 Bibliography:

BATALLER, R. (2013) “Making a request for a service in Spanish: Pragmatic development in

the study abroad setting”. Foreign Language Annals, 43(1), pp.160–175;
BLUM-KULKA, S. & HOUSE, J. (1989) “Cross-cultural and Situational Variation in Requesting
Behavior”. En: S. BLUM-KULKA, J. HOUSE & G. KASPER (ed.), Cross-cultural
Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies, Norwood: Ablex, pp.123–54;
CURCÓ, C. (1998) “¿No me harías un favorcito? Reflexiones en torno a la expresión de la
cortesía verbal en el español de México y el español peninsular”. En: H. HAVERKATE, G.
MULDER y C. FRAILE MALDONADO (eds.). La pragmática lingüística del español.
Recientes desarrollos. Amsterdam: Rodopi. pp.129–17;
HASSALL, T. (2003) “Requests by Australian learners of Indonesian”. Journal of Pragmatics,
vol. 35, pp.1903–1928;
HAVERKATE, H. (2006) “Aspectos pragmalingüísticos de la interrogación en español con
atención especial a las secuencias de preguntas”. Cultura, lenguaje y representación, vol.
3, pp.27–40.

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