Journal
of Pragmatics
513
21 (1994) 513-526
North-Holland
Negation in Spanish and English suggestions and requests : Mitigating effects? Dale
April
Koike*
Received August
1992;
revised version May
1993
Negation in speech acts has been identified in past studies as an element that can be used to mitigate the effect of an utterance. The objective of this study is to examine the use of negation in requests and suggestions, principally using data from Spanish and English. It is shown that negation does not always serve to communicate politeness or mitigation in all speech acts, and in fact, may have the opposite effect. The notions of positive and negative politeness posited by Brown and Levinson (1987) do account for many uses of negation in suggestions, and in fact, shed light on the nature of interrogative suggestions in general. They do not apply as easily to requests, however, in that they do not account for differences in force created by the negative in both languages. The data are also examined in terms of what they reveal about the mitigation of suggestions and requests through implicature.
1. Introduction Negation in speech acts has been identified in past studies as an element that can be used to mitigate the effect of an utterance. Leech (1983: 170) accounts for politeness in negated offers through Grice’s (1975) rules of implicature. For example, in (1) Won’t
you have something
to eat?
Leech states that a negative question implicates a negative assumption and a cancelled positive belief. The assumption is, basically, that the listener understands that the speaker is using negation to give him or her a chance to withdraw or suppress a polite refusal.
Correspondence to: D.A. Koike, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Texas at Austin, Batts Hall 110, Austin, TX 78712-I 155, USA. * I would like to thank Knud Lambrecht for his helpful comments in the early stages of this paper. I also thank Chiyo Nishida, Masanori Kimura, and Risako Ide for the Japanese data and other linguistic comments.
0378-2166/94/$07.00 0 1994 SSDl0378-2166(93)E0071-7
Elsevier Science B.V. All rights
reserved
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The issue of the use of negation in politeness is indirectly discussed by Brown and Levinson (1987: 129-136) who posit the concept of “positive” and “negative” politeness. “Positive” politeness is attention paid to the addressee’s positive face; that is, the addressee’s desire that his or her wants should be considered as desirable. They outline several linguistic realizations of positive politeness, one of which is to presuppose knowledge of the listener’s wants and attitudes. Another positive politeness strategy is that of giving (or asking for) reasons, so that the listener can be led to see the reasonableness of the imposition. “Negative” politeness is “action addressed to the addressee’s negative face, or his want to have his freedom of action unhindered and his attention unimpeded” (1987: 1299130). They propose several strategies to achieve this kind of politeness, two of which are relevant to this study. These are: (a) question or hedge; and (b) be pessimistic. These notions of politeness are used by Brown and Levinson to account for the illocutionary force of suggestions and requests, and will be examined below. My objective in this study is to examine the use of negation in requests and suggestions, principally using data from Spanish, which are compared with English. It will be shown that negation does not always serve to communicate politeness or mitigation in all speech acts, and in fact, may have the opposite effect. I will also show that the notions of politeness posited by Brown and Levinson do account for many uses of negation in suggestions, and in fact, shed light on the nature of interrogative suggestions in general. They do not apply as easily to requests, however, in that they do not account for differences in force created by the negative in both languages. Finally, the data will be examined in terms of what they reveal about the mitigation of suggestions and requests.
2. Negation and politeness While I do not wish to imply that offers are similar speech acts to suggestions and requests, perhaps the clearest illustration of how negation is used to express politeness can be seen in the following offers of another drink in Japanese: Intimate register nomu (with rising intonation) Moo ippai another one cup drink ‘Will you drink another?’ ipai nomanai (2’) Moo another one cup drink-NEG ‘Won’t you drink another?’ (more polite) (2)
D.A.
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515
Casual acquaintance
Moo ippai nomimasu ka drink INTERROG. ‘Will you drink?’ (3’) Moo ippai nomimasen ka drink-NEG ‘Won’t you drink?’ (more polite) (4) High deference register Moo ippai onomini narimasu ka INTERROG. RESPECT drink ‘Will you drink?’ (4’) Moo ippai onomini narimasen ka (more polite) drink-NEG ‘Won’t you drink?’ In each case, the form of the offer changes according to the register, and the negative element makes the non-negated utterance even more polite. Example (4’) is the most polite of all the offers here. Returning to the notion of positive politeness discussed by Brown and Levinson, the strategy of presupposing knowledge of the listener’s wants and attitudes can account for offers with a negative element, as seen in (l), (2’), (3’), and (4’). On this reading, negative questions, which presume “yes” as an answer, are a way of showing awareness of the listener’s desires. An interesting detail is that, in Latin, the use of nonne in questions presumes an afhrmative answer, and could have been used for this positive politeness function (1987: 122-123).l The positive politeness strategy of giving or asking for reasons so that the hearer can see the reason behind the imposition, may account for indirect suggestions that demand reasons, such as (5) Why not lend me your cottage for the weekend? (6) Why don’t we go to the seashore? According to this concept, the speaker demands reasons through “Why not”, and if listeners cannot give reasons why they should not or cannot cooperate, they will do the act proposed (1987: 128). 1 Brown and Levinson (1987: 122-123) state that “negative questions, which presume ‘yes’ as an answer”, are polite in that they show that the speaker knows the listener’s wants, tastes, etc. Due to this attention to the listener, they classify this type of utterance under positive politeness. Their examples include offers, e.g., (i) Wouldn’t you like a drink? and opinions, e.g., (ii) Isn’t it wonderful? and not suggestions or requests. One should note that offers and opinions are not speech acts that are of cost to the listener, and therefore have different characteristics.
516
D.A. Koike 1 Negation in Spanish and English
The use of the negative in requests is treated by Brown and Levinson under the concept of negative politeness. The two strategies mentioned earlier, (a) question or hedge and (b) be pessimistic, are mutually exclusive, since in (a) the speaker questions to convey uncertainty that the listener can do the action, and in (b) the speaker asserts to convey the assumption that the listener is unlikely to do this act. An example of (a) is (7) Can you pass the salt? They state (1987: 175) that the “Be pessimistic” strategy, in which the speaker assumes the listener is not likely to do the action, has three important realizations: (a) the negative (with tag); (b) the subjunctive (which is realized by the conditional in Spanish); and (c) remote possibility markers. An example of this strategy is (8) You couldn’t
possibly
pass the salt, could you?
Thus, Brown and Levinson, while not directly addressing the use of the negative in various speech acts, do account for its use within these two categories of politeness and their respective strategies. They make no mention of any mitigating properties of the negative, however, in any of the speech acts discussed above. Leech’s and Brown and Levinson’s notions certainly do account for many strategies used in suggestions. In English suggestions, however, where use of the negative is optional, the negative provides a stronger force, whereas in Spanish, where it is not optional, there is no demanding effect. In English and Spanish requests in which negation is optional, the strategies given by Brown and Levinson seem to apply to English but not to Spanish.
3. Methodology of data collection Suggestions and requests drawn from two studies of directive speech acts form the corpus of data for this discussion (Hobbs, 1990; Koike, 1992). In the two studies, a total of 83 native Spanish speakers from Cuernavaca, Mexico, were asked in an oral questionnaire how they would get a person to get up from a special chair reserved for their father. The hypothetical addressees were: (a) a young child whom they knew well, (b) a friend, and (c) a non-intimate authority figure. The native Spanish speakers in both studies were all lower middle to upper middle class adults, who had at least a high school education. Since the informants could use any kind of directive form in their responses, suggestions and requests form only part of the total corpus of data from those studies.
D.A. Koike / Negation in Spanish and English
517
4. Suggestions 4.1. Suggestions
in Spanish and English
Suggestions are complex speech acts that can be characterized by the following conditions. First, either person A (the potential listener of the suggestion) has stated that there is a problem, or person B (the speaker of the suggestion) knows of a problem for A (and perhaps for B, as well), and B makes a suggestion in response, as in the following examples: (9)
A: Me duele la garganta. ‘My throat hurts’ B: LPor que no tomas un jarabe? ‘Why don’t you drink some cough syrup?’
or (10) B: (knowing that A should not be seated in a particular chair, and must move before B’s father walks in): Vamos a sentarnos en el sofa. ‘Let’s sit on the couch.’ Second, the speaker of the suggestion proposes an action, believing (sincerely or not) that it will help the listener toward solving the problem. Third, it is expected that the listener will make some kind of verbal response or will comply with the suggestion. As Brown and Levinson describe them, indirect suggestions typically ask for reasons why the proposed action should not be done. Although the proposal is meant to benefit the listener (and perphaps the speaker), the speaker is actually intruding into the listener’s world by expressing an idea about what the latter should do. In my view, suggestions, as potentially face-threatening acts, are usually mitigated or softened in some way, whether it be lexically, semantically, or syntactically, unless the relationship between interactants is so intimate that mitigation is not required. Moreover, while indirect suggestions typically expect some account of reasons, a suggestion can be conveyed without the expectation of such an account, as will be shown. This study focuses primarily on suggestions that are supposedly of benefit to the listener. The suggestion forms preceding the proposition produced by the informants are shown in Table 1. The suggestions are divided into three types, according to syntactic and lexical considerations. The three types are declarative, interrogative, and imperative. Many of the five suggestion forms in the interrogative category are negated. These negated questions are of special interest in contrast with English suggestions, since their English counterparts express a much stronger force -
D.A. Koike / Negation in Spanish and English
518 Table I Commonly
used formulaic
expressions
Spanish
in Spanish English
Suggestion type : Declarative Deberia No estaria ma1 si Mejor/seria mejor mas rapido, buena idea, etc.) si/infin. Sugiero/creo (que) Puede/Podria Si fuera Ud.. yo
una
suggestions
(cf. Hobbs,
1990: Koike.
1992)
equivalent
‘You should/ought to’ ‘It wouldn’t be bad if you’ ‘It would be better (faster, a good idea, etc.) if/to‘ ‘I suggest/think that’ ‘You can/could’ ‘If I were you’ (I would)
Inclusive ‘we Vamos a Podemos
‘Let’s’ ‘We can’
Suggestion type: Interrogative iPor que no iNo deberia iQut tal si/iQue le parece si iNo ha pensado en iNo puede
‘Why don’t you/Why not’ ‘Shouldn’t you’ ‘How about/What do you think if ‘Haven’t you thought about/considered’ ‘Can’t you’
Suggestion type: imperative Trate de Vamos a
‘Try to’ ‘Let’s’ (also of ‘inclusive
we’)
that of a reproach, or even an insult. Let us suppose a context in which a friend says he is having trouble installing some electrical wiring in his house. The following suggestions in English and Spanish are appropriate: (11) Have you thought about reading this book? (12) ~NO has pensado en leer este libro? ‘Haven’t you thought about reading this book?’ (13) Should you read this book? (14) ~NO deberias leer este libro? ‘Shouldn’t you read this book?’ To convey the illocutionary force of a suggestion in Spanish, the Spanish equivalents of (11) and (13) must be expressed negatively, as in (12) and (14). If one did not negate these utterances, as in (15) #iHas pensado en leer este libro? * ‘Have you thought about reading this book?’ 2 The symbol the context.
# is used to denote a sentence
that, pragmatically
speaking,
is not appropriate
for
D.A. Koike 1 Negation
in Spanish and English
519
(16) #iDeberias leer este libro? ‘Should you (perhaps) read this book?’ they would be purely yes/no confirmation questions in Spanish. To an English speaker, however, the English translations of (12) and (14) suggest that the listener has not considered this particular option. These negative sentences can sound like an insult or a rebuke, as if the listener has overlooked the option mentioned. Both the negated Spanish and English suggestions communicate a demand for reasons, but the English forms are too forceful to be polite. 4.2. Interrogative suggestions, implicature, and positive politeness Spanish and English interrogative suggestions can be examined in view of Leech’s explanations of implicature in negation and politeness. In examples (12) and (14), the speaker assumes that the listener should not do, or has not considered, a particular action, and asks the listener to confirm this assumption. I believe that, since the negative is part of the conventional suggestion formula, there is no implicature involved regarding that element. The negative does not make the utterance more or less polite. The fact that there is no affirmative counterpart suggestion in Spanish shows that a comparison of ‘more or less polite’ cannot be made. The negative utterances do not give the listener a chance to withdraw or suppress a polite refusal, since to do so in the case of a suggestion is not more polite than to give a reason for not following it. On the other hand, there are affirmative counterpart forms for the English suggestions, seen in (11) and (13). It is the affirmative suggestion that expresses a more softened form. So in the English negative interrogative suggestion forms, the listener does go through an inference process, because there is an option to use the negative or not. In the English glosses of the negative utterances in (12) and (14) the speaker questions the assumption that the listener has not thought about doing X, and due to this questioning, the force of the utterance is relatively strong (in relation to the affirmative utterance). The affirmative suggestions in (11) and (13) are not as strong for reasons of ambiguity of interpretation. The speaker assumes or believes that the hearer should think about or do X, but does not assume that the listener has thought about or done X. The speaker questions, but the question can have three implications: (a) in its most literal interpretation, the speaker is asking a simple yes/no information question to find out if the listener has thought about or should do X; (b) the speaker is asking the question to find out the listener’s reaction to the proposition; or (c) as a suggestion, the speaker is asking if the listener has thought about or should do X, and is letting the listener know that s/he (the speaker) believes it should be done by asking about it. Since the listener is not entirely sure of the speaker’s true intent, the force of the utterance is softened.
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Regarding Brown and Levinson’s account of the force of suggestions within the notion of positive politeness, the idea that the speaker is asking for reasons why the listener is not willing to do the proposed action can account for the negative in Spanish interrogative suggestions in cases that involve a negative. The data show one exception in negative use, which is the iQut taf si/QuP te parece si ‘How about if/What do you think if. Through inclusion of the lexical item si ‘if, a condition is posited that does not exist at the present time. The form is revealing of a difference in intent between the English and Spanish expressions, e.g., (17) iQuC tal si lees este? ‘How about if you read this one?’ (18) How about reading this one‘? In the English example in (18) the speaker asks if reading the book is an option that the listener can or will consider, and solicits an opinion of a proposed action. On the other hand, in the Spanish example in (17) which must be expressed with the si-clause, the speaker asks if this is a possibility, or a possible reality. The Spanish example also questions what the outcome might be if the action is carried out. In suggestions that contain a C-clause, the notion of demanding reasons does not apply, since the speaker is not demanding a reason but rather asking the listener’s opinion on possible consequences. In sum, we see in the data that the negated Spanish forms conform more closely to the typical notion of interrogative suggestions asking for reasons. Mitigation can be seen in the form with the &clause. In English, however, the account for reasons in negated interrogative forms is quite direct, so we often see a preference for mitigating these forms through use of affirmative interrogative suggestions that are ambiguous in intent. To clarify the point that a comparison of paired English affirmative and negative interrogative suggestions shows the negated form has a stronger implicit force, a list of English suggestions, drawn from my own intuitions and some observations of natural speech, is shown in Table 2. The interrogative forms show that there are really only two forms without any option to soften, in which the speaker directly asks for reasons why the suggestion would not be followed; i.e., “Why not” and “Why don’t you”. The “How about” form already represents a hedge in which the utterance could be heard as ambiguous, either offering a suggestion or asking a simple question. The other forms offer the option to use the negative or not.
D.A. Koike / Negation in Spanish and English
Table 2 Commonly
used suggestion
521
forms in English
Suggestion type: Declarative You should/ought to It wouldn’t be a bad idea to It would be helpful if you I suggest that you You can/could If 1 were you Inclusive ‘we’ Let’s We can/could Suggestion type: Interrogative Why don’t you/Why not Should/Shouldn’t you Can you/Can’t you How about Have you thought about/considered Would you consider Suggestion type: Imperative Try to
5. Requests 5.1.
Types of requests
Requests have been the object of much investigation. Bach and Harnish (1979: 47) state that in requests, the speaker expresses the desire that the listener do the action, and the intention that the listener do it because of the speaker’s desire, or at least partially for this reason. The listener is asked to do the action, instead of being told to do so, and can decide to do the action or not, the outcome of which is largely or solely for the benefit of the speaker. Requests, then, are nearly always mitigated, since the action is to be done as a favor to the speaker. Bach and Harnish note that different verbs of requesting convey differences in strength of attitude, such as the difference between ‘ask’ and ‘beg’, e.g., (21) I ask that you do X. (22) I beg you to do X. Differences in the speaker’s attitude can also be conveyed by syntactic means, as seen clearly in our Spanish examples:
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D.A. Koike / Negation in Spanish and English
(23) Le pido que se siente aqui. ‘I ask that you sit here’ (24) LPodria Ud. sentarse aqui? ‘Could you sit here?’ Example (23) an utterance in the declarative, conveys a sense of deference and social distance, whereas the interrogative form of (24) is polite and yet still interactive; that is, the listener would normally respond to the speaker’s interrogative directive in a verbal manner. Example (23) requires less of a verbal response on the part of the listener. 3 Table 3 illustrates the requests used in the Spanish data. Many different types of requestive formulaic expressions were used before the proposition. As in the case of suggestions, there are two major syntactic groups of requests in these data - declarative and interrogative. The most frequently used expression contains the modal poder ‘to be able’, which can be preceded optionally by the negative, e.g., (24) LPodria Ud. sentarse alli? ‘Could you sit there?’ (25) ~NO podria Ud. sentarse alli? ‘Couldn’t you sit there?’ The other expressions in the two syntactic categories can be grouped semantically according to expressions that ask for permission, a favor, or the listener’s kindness, those that ask about the possibility of doing the action, or the listener’s reaction, as well as those that ask the listener’s desire or will to do the action, or if it is a bother if the action is done. The great majority of the requests are in the interrogative form. Regarding negated forms, only three negated interrogative forms appeared in the data, seen in (26) ~NO quiere sentarse alli? ‘Don’t you want to sit there?’ (27) ~NO podria sentarse alli? ‘Couldn’t you sit there?’ (28) ~NO hay problema si Ud. se sienta alli? ‘There isn’t a problem if you sit there?’
3 The difference here is really a difference between polite and deferent interaction; this is discussed in Koike (1992). Briefly, in deferent interaction, social distance to the point of little or no direct interaction is emphasized. In polite interaction, the element of respect while maintaining direct interaction is present.
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Table 3 Commonly
used formulaic
expressions
in Spanish
requests
(cf. Hobbs,
1990; Koike,
1992)
Request type: Declarafive a. Favor Quiero ver si me hate el favor de b. Possibility Quiero ver si es posible que Le voy a pedir que/Le pediria
que
Tengo que pedirle que c. Reactions No se si a Ud le disguste
que
Request type: Interrogative a. Desire iQuisiera/Quiere Ud. iNo quiere b. Modal iPuede/Podria Se puede iNo podria
‘I want to see if it is possible that’ ‘I am going to ask you/I would [like to] ask you’ ‘I have to ask you’
‘I don’t know if it will displease
‘Can/Could ‘Couldn’t
si
hate X/Me da chance
$eria tan amable de iMe haria el favor de LTendria Ud. la bondad e. Permission ;Me permitiria iMe da permiso iMe deja f. Possibility &Es posible que
de
de
you that’
‘Do you want to’ ‘Don’t you want to’
Ud./
c. Bother ;No hay problema si LLe molesta/jNo le molesta d. Will iMe dari/Me
‘I want to see if you will do me the favor of
you/Can
one?’
you?
‘Is there no problem if ‘Will it bother you to/Will it not bother
you if
‘Will you give me/Will you do X/Will you give me the chance to’ ‘Would you be so kind as to’ ‘Would you do me the favor of ‘Would you have the goodness to’
‘Would you permit me to’ ‘Will you give me permission ‘Will you allow me’
‘Is it possible
to’
that’
Nevertheless, all the interrogative forms could be negated and still convey the intent of a request. Since negation is optional in requests, one might ask what its pragmatic effect may be. Considering the fact that the negative occurred so infrequently in the data, one must question if negated requests convey
524
D.A. Koike / Negation
politeness. The following which was more polite:
examples
in Spanish and English
were given to several native speakers
to see
(29) LPodrias prestarme tu blusa? ‘Could you lend me your blouse?’ (30) ~NO podrias prestarme tu blusa? ‘Couldn’t you lend me your blouse?’ Some speakers said (29) was simply ‘more common’, but that both were polite. Others believed that (30) sounded somewhat more insistent; none thought that (30) was more polite than (29) or rude. It should be noted that there was no occurrence of both a negated form and its affirmative counterpart in the data. The conclusion that may be drawn is that the negated form is not more polite, but its force is fairly equal to that of the affirmative request. This conclusion seems intuitively to run counter to the notion of requests, in which the listener is asked to do the action as a favor to the speaker. The negated form makes a request but also asks for reasons why the action would not be done. It is curious that although suggestions and requests are very different speech acts, the negative can communicate a similar intent. It is similar, but not the same, since the speaker, by using a negated request, is not hoping that the listener will see the reasonableness of the request by asking for reasons why it should not be granted. This issue is discussed below. 5.2. Requests,
implicature,
and negative politeness
Considering the degree of implicature involved can look at the following requests as examples:
in the negative
requests,
we
(31) iNo puedes prestarme tu pluma? ‘Can’t you lend me your pen?’ (32) iNo quieres ayudarme? ‘Don’t you want to help me?’ According to Leech’s ideas, the negative in these Spanish requests, as in their English glosses, implies that the speaker assumes the listener cannot, or does not want to, do the action, and asks if that assumption is true. I believe the speaker assumes the listener can fulfill the request and is asking the listener to give some reason as to why the request cannot be granted. This questioning would seem to make the imposition of the request even greater. So the logical question is why the negated form in Spanish is not as forceful as the English counterpart. I believe the answer may lie in factors of interactant relationship and intonation. Based on informal observations, it seems that the negated request is used when (a) speakers feel so comfortable with the listener that
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they are fairly certain the answer will be affirmative (going back to the Latin tradition), so the risk of losing face is minimized; or when (b) speakers are being somewhat insistent while, at the same time, softening the utterance through intonational contours to make it sound like a plea. In English, on the other hand, negated requests are often used when the request has already been rejected once, and when the speaker is making a more insistent second attempt4 These negated requests are not mitigated by using a plea intonation. According to Brown and Levinson’s concept of negative politeness, the Spanish negated interrogative request forms in the data illustrate a combination of two of the strategies discussed; i.e., (a) they question (but don’t hedge), and (b) they are ‘pessimistic’ through use of the negative. According to the schema for English, this combination should be heard as rude, e.g., (33) Couldn’t you pass the salt? The negative politeness notion, however, does not explain the lesser force in Spanish negative interrogative requests. In Spanish, the pragmatic effect of the negative is that of conveying some insistence of the speaker’s commitment to the proposed act, although to a lesser extent than in English. Again, this effect in Spanish may be linked to contextual factors, or to use of the negative utterance with an intonation pattern that can soften the force more than in English, and to the social relationship between the speaker and hearer.
6. Conclusion In conclusion, negation in Spanish and English suggestions and requests is not used to soften or mitigate the proposition. In fact, it could be claimed that the negative gives the opposite effect in some speech acts in certain circumstances. For example, in languages such as Spanish, the negative is part of a conventionalized formula in certain interrogative suggestions. In those cases, the negative does not convey any pragmatic effect. What we have found through these data is that the Spanish negated forms conform more closely to the standard concept of an interrogative suggestion, in which the speaker asks for reasons why an action should not be done. The English suggestions show more ways to mitigate that force. Brown and Levinson’s notion of negative politeness can account for the negative use in English requests but does not provide an explanation for the
4 Trosborg (personal communication) found in a study of requests by English and Danish speakers that native English speakers produce very few negated requests (14.5%) in comparison to native Danish speakers (32.8%). One possible reason is that the combination in English of qucsrion + negation may carry an overtone of exasperation.
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lesser force in the negative counterparts in Spanish. Insistence is expressed in the English forms, but to a lesser extent in Spanish, where the close relationship between interactants and change in intonation may play a crucial role. Finally, regarding the pragmatic effect of the negative, the data indicate in general that the negative varies in use and effect according to speech act and according to language. In neither suggestions nor requests was use of negation found to be a mitigating factor. What we have seen, however, is that mitigation is achieved in these speech acts through strategies such as ambiguity of intent, lexical items that change the force, and intonation. It is hoped that through this study, a better knowledge of suggestions and requests, as well as ways in which one can mitigate the force of the speech acts in both Spanish and English, has been attained.
References Bach, Kent and Robert Harnish, 1979. Linguistic communication and speech acts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Brown, Penelope and Stephen Levinson, 1987. Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grice, H. Paul, 1975. Logic and conversation. In: Peter Cole and Jerry Morgan, eds.. Syntax and semantics, Vol. 3: 41-58. New York: Academic Press. Hobbs, Dianne, 1990. Gender-based strategies in issuing directives in Mexican Spanish. Unpublished dissertation, University of Texas at Austin. Horn, Laurence, 1989. A natural history of negation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Koike, Dale, 1989. Requests and the role of deixis in politeness. Journal of Pragmatics 13: 187202. Koike, Dale, 1992. Language and social relationship in Brazilian Portuguese: The pragmatics of politeness. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Koike. Dale, forthcoming. Transfer of pragmatic competence and suggestions in Spanish foreign language learning. In: Susan Gass and Joyce Neu (eds.). Speech acts across cultures. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Leech, Geoffrey, 1983. Principles of pragmatics. London: Longman.