Face, face-threatening acts and politeness in Cuban Spanish

The present thesis is an in-depth examination of the politeness strategies employed by speakers of Cuban Spanish in their performance of the speech acts of request and apologies. It is also an attempt at determining how these politeness strategies reflect the specific cultural norms of facework and face behavior. It attempts to test Brown and Levinson's (1978, 1987) claims about the use of politeness strategies with empirical evidence from naturally occurring conversations recorded in Havana, Cuba in 1996. The ultimate goal of this study, which aspires to contribute some novel empirical data to the developing field of cross-cultural pragmatics, is to determine the exact nature of Cuban face or personality and the ways in which personal territories are delimited and conceived of in this particular socio-cultural environment.; The findings of the study can be summarized as follows: In Cuban Spanish, the conflicting wants of the Speakers to be undisturbed (negative face and negative politeness) and to be shown tokens of admiration (positive face and positive politeness), at least as reflected in the linguistic behavior of Speakers issuing requests, orders, apologizing and responding to compliments, is generally not resolved by not wanting to impose upon the interlocutor.; At the same time, the Hearer's face wants are also not resolved by giving preference to the negative face want, i.e., by communicating an overriding expectation of not being imposed upon. In other words, Cuban Speakers do not assume that their Hearer prefers his/her peace and self-determination to expressions of regard.; The present findings for Cuban Spanish are based on the comparison of frequencies of the use of negative and positive politeness strategies in two main kinds of speech act under consideration: requests and apologies. The total number of speech acts that I have examined is 444 (containing a total of 733 linguistic manifestations of politeness strategies): 403 of these were tokens often different categories of requests, 28 were tokens of apologies and 11 were tokens of a specific subtype of compliment response: acceptances of compliments. This comparison points toward an unmistakable conclusion: in present-day Cuban society, the expression of concern for the interlocutor's positive face wants is clearly the prevailing, preferred and expected politeness strategy. Positive politeness strategies considerably outweigh negative politeness strategies in performing all of the examined categories of requests, apologies, and acceptances of compliments.