'Polite' and 'impolite' requests and apologies in British English and Uruguayan Spanish : a comparative study.

The research hereby presented provides an analysis and interpretation of
the realisation patterns of requests and apologies by female and male
native speakers of British English and Uruguayan Spanish. The speech
acts in question have been analysed following Brown and Levinson's
(1978, 1987) 'negative' and 'positive' politeness distinction.
The data for the study were collected in Uruguay and England by
means of a non-prescriptive open role-play designed for the present study
and performed by university students in both countries.
The results obtained show that the performance of the above speech acts is
motivated by the same social variables in Uruguayan Spanish and British
English. The level of (in)directness in requests correlates negatively with
the social distance between the interlocutors. In other words, the smaller
the social distance between the participants the more direct the request
will be. The performance of apologies, on the other hand, is motivated by
an interaction between the severity of the offence and social power in that
the less social power a speaker has in relation to his/her addressee and the
more severe the offence, the more likely s/he is to apologise.
The results also show that higher levels of indirectness together with
heavily modified requests are appropriate in British English but not in
Uruguayan Spanish where a preference for less tentative requests is
expected. In terms of the apologies, this study shows the British
employing a much higher number of intensified as well as non-intensified
apologies than the Uruguayans.
With respect to the distinction between 'positive' and 'negative'
politeness this study shows that both forms of politeness interpreted as the
want for association and dissociation respectively, are present in both
British and Uruguayan culture with the British showing a tendency to
pursue 'negative' politeness more than the Uruguayans. This pattern was
also found to be present in the linguistic behaviour British and Uruguayan
females when compared to their male counterparts.