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