A comparison of the realization of requestive speech acts in Italian and German

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to answer some questions left open in my Bachelor’s thesis "How to do things with words. The philosophy of language of J.L. Austin" and at the same time to expand some of its issues shifting the perspective from that of philosophy of language to the domain of contrastive pragmatics. In particular, three issues are afforded particular attention: 1) the conceptual clarification of the phenomenon of indirectness; 2) the cross-cultural comparison of requestive speech act realization patterns between German and Italian and 3) the relationship between indirectness and the perception of politeness in the two aforementioned speech communities. The methodology used was inspired by the "Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP)", a collective study initiated by Blum-Kulka and Olshtain in 1984 to investigate intra-language and inter-language (cultural) variability in the realization patterns of requests and apologies amongst eight languages, with attention to the comparison between native and non-native usage. Empirical data were gathered by means of a “Discourse Completion Test” from 40 Italian students enrolled at the University of Udine and at the University “Ca’ Foscari” in Venice, and 40 German students attending the "Bergische Universität Wuppertal" and the "Humboldt Universität zu Berlin". Realizations of requests are analysed according to the CCSARP’s “coding manual”, reported in Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper 1989, and interpreted at the light of the main theories concerning verbal politeness. Results show that both groups of participants are perfectly aware of the difference of the four socio-pragmatic situations proposed and tailor their requests according to the context. It is found that both groups of subjects rely heavily on conventionally indirect strategies. On the whole, German speakers appear to use more indirect request strategies than their Italian counterparts. They also select with a higher frequency syntactic, lexical and phrasal downgraders. Italian speakers tend to select slightly lower levels of indirectness but to “compensate” with a consistent larger use of alerters, supportive moves and upgraders. The findings are radically different than it was expected in the last situation, where the face treat was rated bigger. Therefore, it is suggested that further research should be made on the difference in the perception of the social parameters determining the rated “face-threat” between the two cultures. Deeper insights into the link between indirectness and politeness in the two cultures involved is also needed in order to understand the reasons beyond the pragmatic choices observed.