Politeness in Brazil and Spain: a comparative case study

• Main Authors: Enrique Huelva Unterbäumen, Helena Santiago Vigata, Yamilka Rabasa Fernández
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidade de Brasília 2011-12-01
• Series: Horizontes
• Subjects: estratégias de polidez; questionários de hábitos sociais; diferenças interculturais; Brasil-Espanha
• Online Access: http://periodicos.unb.br/index.php/horizontesla/article/view/5671

The aim of this paper is to present some results of a comparative study between the politeness strategies that two Spanish and two Brazilian professors would use, both in Portuguese and Spanish, in twelve hypothetical situations presented on a social behavior questionnaire. This work is based on a previous study published by Piatti (2003) in Argentina, where the author observed some pragmatic differences between a group of students of Spanish as a foreign language and a group of native speakers of the language. With her hypotheses as a starting point, the scope was moved to a small group of people with high communicative competence in both languages, in order to give a different insight on of the pragmatic differences that exist between Brazilians and the Spanish. Based on the findings, we have tried to establish some intercultural differences among the politeness strategies used in Brazil and in Spain.