El uso de la cortesía y las sobreposiciones en las conversaciones. Un análisis contrastivo alemán-español.

Abstract

The thesis describes a new approach to the theory of politeness in conversation, which is considered a form of social interaction between speakers inherent to the social and cultural context in which it takes place. As such, the participants in the conversation want the communication to be carried out appropriately, as much for themselves as for the others; therefore, they adopt principles of behaviour, which are considered valid by the social and cultural group to which they belong. It is this valid behaviour that facilitates communication and favours social relationships through interaction of a linguistic and non-linguistic nature, constituting what we call politeness. In our study we first set up a framework based on the literature available on the topic, presenting the guiding hypothesis and enumerating the objectives established. Second, we examine the concept of politeness and reflect on its role in conversations within a given cultural context. Third, we discuss speech acts, focusing specifically on indirect speech acts and how different speech acts are carried out in different cultural contexts. Fourthly, we study the theory of conversational analysis, centring attention on the various concepts of overlaps. With this theoretical framework, we analyse the corpus of transactional and colloquial conversations in German and in Spanish, emphasising the distinct interpretations of the overlaps in conversation as well as the communicative and social realisation of politeness in the different conversations recorded. In order to contrast our findings and interpretations with the opinions of native speakers, we designed a questionnaire to distribute among German and Spanish students, their responses being discussed in detail. Finally, conclusions are drawn and future research objectives are proposed.