Pragmatic conscience from native and non-native students of Spanish: The case of requests towards professors

Abstract

In this qualitative study, we analyse the Peninsular Spanish address terms tú and usted in students’ requests towards their professors. To do so, we use the corpus COPINE (Corpus Oral de Peticiones en Interacciones Naturalizadas en Español), which comprises naturalized interactions (following Tran’s methodology, 2006), written Discourse Completion Tests, an online questionnaire and retrospective interviews on the students’ use of politeness. We compare data from Spanish native students and French-speaking students of Spanish as a foreign language. The previous quantitative analysis (Marsily, submitted) indicates that Spanish students prefer addressing their professors with the informal pronoun tú, whereas the non-native group rather uses the honorific pronoun usted. In the perception questionnaire, both groups evaluate requests by means of usted as being more formal than the ones with tú. This analysis is further supported by a qualitative analysis of comments from the participants, as well as from their professors, on their perception of politeness. Thereby, the study offers a panorama of different criteria that Spanish native and non-native speakers keep in mind to address their professor. It also gives an overview not only of their perception of politeness in academic interactions, but also of tips for non-native speakers, as well as linguistic (in)appropriate and (un)acceptable elements in Spanish as a native and foreign language