DOWNGRADERS AND UPGRADERS IN CHINESE AND SPANISH REQUEST: A RESEARCH PROPOSAL

Abstract

Research about differences or similarities in Chinese and Spanish pragmatic uses is still an emerging field. As a result of these, for the moment drawing conclusions about this topic requires researches or works which compare Chinese or Spanish with other languages and cultures. However, these researches not always use the same methodology or share the same goals. Therefore, the aim of this research is contribute to ease this situation. In order to do this, this work compares how Chinese people and how Spanish people use downgraders and upgraders in a specific kind of directive speech act, request.The research follows the methodology that was used by Blum-Kulka et al. (1989), Discourse Completion Test. However, the analysis of the corpus has into consideration, on the one hand, the own characteristics of Spanish and Chinese language; and, on the other hand, the resources truly used by the informants that took part into this research. Therefore, downgraders considered for the analysis of Spanish corpus were taken from Albelda and Cestero (2011) and Cestero and Albelda (2012), and for the Chinese corpus from Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) and Zhang (1995a). In the same way, upgraders considered for the analysis of Spanish corpus were taken from Albelda (2007), and for the Chinese corpus from Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) and Zhang (1995a).