Directness in Peninsular Spanish Requests: Native Speaker and Language Learner Perceptions

The present study investigates the linguistic feature of directness found in Peninsular Spanish requests and how directness is perceived by both native speakers of Spanish and second language learners (L2) of Spanish. The objectives of this study are to clearly define directness and to highlight that directness and politeness should be considered as separate entities, contrary to previous literature. Perceptions of both native speakers and L2 learners of Spanish are collected in order to analyze the participants’ evaluations of directness. The participants provide their judgments by ranking various criteria in a Likert-scale task. The prompts of this task consist of varied structures of service encounter requests with manipulation of pertinent variables (e.g., mitigation, request strategies, politeness markers, etc.). The goal of this study is to gain a better understanding on how direct structures are perceived by language users and how certain linguistic utterances are interpreted by both native and L2 speakers of Spanish in regard to directness, politeness, and acceptability.