The Speech Act of Requesting in Brazilian Portuguese And Italian: A Study on the Context Assessment by the Speakers

Abstract

In the perspective of Cross-cultural Pragmatics, this article investigates the speech act of requesting, foregrounding the assessment of the context by native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese and Italian, based on the following parameters: the relative social distance between the interlocutors, the speaker’s evaluation of his right in issuing the request, its difficulty, and the estimated likelihood of compliance of the hearer. To this purpose, to the Written Discourse Completion Task, created by the Research Group “Pragmática (inter)linguística, intercultural e cross-cultural”, with eight communicative situations, which vary based on rank of imposition and social distance (BROWN; LEVINSON, 1987), four questions were added regarding the perception of the contextual parameters of each of these situations. The answers of 40 Brazilians and 40 Italians, provided
through a Likert scale with a score from 1 to 5, were submitted to a statistical analysis in order to verify possible convergences and divergences between the two groups. The results indicate that the perception of Italians and Brazilians converges in communicative situations in which less is demanded of the face and diverges when at least one of the independent variables is high, which reveals aspects about
the tendency towards indirectness within the two cultures. The study, therefore, demonstrates the relevance of taking into account the different perceptions of the same communicative situations and provides insights to deepen the understanding
of the relationship between language and culture.