Language politeness: Directive speech acts in Brazilian Portuguese, Costa Rican Spanish and Canadian English

This study attempts to further the understanding of linguistic politeness by comparing three different languages. One aim of this dissertation is to test the claims of Brown and Levinson's universal politeness theory. Another aim of this study is to identify politeness strategies and substrategies, specifically requests in Brazilian Portuguese, Costa Rican Spanish and Canadian English speech acts.; An empirical study was conducted in order to collect the data. The data collection instrument consisted of a discourse completion test (DCT) consisting of eighteen situations, which were specifically designed to test the theory. Three variables, distance (D), power (P) and risk (R), were examined to determine the effect of the politeness value of each situation.; A total of ninety subjects, thirty native speakers from each language, participated in this study. All of the participants had either completed at least four years of undergraduate studies or were in their last year.; The results show the strongest support when analyzing the risk (R) variable. Less support is given to both the distance (D) and power (P) variables.; The findings also demonstrate that each culture utilizes different request patterns due to differences in cross-cultural social norms and values.; The Canadian group is considered the most formal and indirect followed by the Brazilians. The Costa Rican group displays more directness, and as a result, are considered to be less formal. The Canadian group reacted very differently from the other two groups when money or material goods were involved. They show a high degree of avoidance especially when a request is made to a friend or colleague.; Therefore, other factors should be taken into consideration besides the three variables: social distance, power and risk, claimed to be universal by Brown and Levinson's Politeness Theory, in order to determine what motivates communicative behavior.