Investigating Speech Acts and Politeness in Romance Languages: A Contrastive and Methodological Approach

Presentation by María Sampedro Mella (Université catholique de Louvain).

Abstract

This presentation examines methodological difficulties in the study of speech acts and politeness phenomena in language use. These difficulties have led to the development of elicited methods for gathering representative samples, such as the Discourse Completion Test (DCT) or role-plays. Such methods enable systematic observation of language use across comparable contexts and have been widely used in pragmatic research, yielding valuable data. To illustrate this, the first part of this presentation includes a contrastive pragmatic analysis of selected speech acts elicited through DCTs in Peninsular Spanish, European Portuguese, and French from France. Particular attention is paid to how forms of address and politeness strategies vary across these languages. The analysis suggests that while Spanish speakers tend to prefer more direct and affiliative strategies (e.g., informal address forms, imperatives, and expressions of closeness), Portuguese and French speakers tend to use more mitigation and distance-marking strategies (e.g., formal address forms, conditional verb forms, and modal expressions).

The second part presents a pragmatic annotation system that enables the automatic retrieval of a set of speech acts (such as greetings, requests, offers, and questions, among others). This system was developed in the ESLORA Corpus (Corpus for the Study of Oral Spanish) from the University of Santiago de Compostela. It provides a practical tool for corpus linguistics, as most spoken corpora contain only morpho-syntactic annotation. The presentation discusses the criteria guiding the annotation design, the technical and linguistic challenges encountered, and the solutions adopted. Finally, this pragmatic annotation is applied both in corpus-based research in pragmatics and in data-driven approaches to second language teaching.