The present study investigates whether Chinese immigrant workers in Spain are perceived as polite as they intend to be by L1 Spanish speakers when producing requests in Spanish and, if not, whether intonation might be responsible for these communicative misunderstandings.
Knowledge about politeness is crucial to avoid intercultural conflicts (Keckes, 2015), since politeness plays a key role in cross-cultural communication and intercultural adaptation (Spencer-Oatey and Franklin, 2009). Whereas the acquisition of L2 politeness strategies has been broadly studied (cf. Bardovi-Harlig, 2017), the field of L2 phono-pragmatic acquisition is still insufficiently explored (Ramírez and Romero, 2005). Intonation has proven to directly affect politeness judgements given by L1 speakers in intonational languages such as Spanish (Hidalgo-Navarro, 2009; Devís-Herraiz, 2011). However, to our knowledge, not so many researchers have yet focused on the acquisition of L2 Spanish intonation patterns characterizing politeness (Astruc and Vanrell, 2016). Therefore, more research in this field is necessary, especially with L2 Spanish speakers whose L1 is not and intonational but a tonal language, such as Mandarin Chinese. The present study investigates whether Chinese immigrant workers in Spain are perceived as polite as they intend to be by L1 Spanish speakers when producing requests in Spanish and, if not, whether intonation might be responsible for these communicative misunderstandings. A corpus of Spanish L2 requests was compiled, perceptually validated by L1 Spanish speakers and analyzed using the Melodic Analysis of Speech Model (Cantero y Font-Rochés, 2009), in order to observe the melodic differences between utterances perceived as polite and those perceived as impolite. In a second study we manipulated the utterances perceived as impolite, in order to check in a perceptive test whether intonation alone could transform them into polite requests. Results show which are the melodic strategies that might help L2 Spanish speakers when intending to convey politeness. This might be helpful for Spanish language learners and teachers alike.
