How to address a professor? Address practices in request formulations by Spanish native and non-native students

Marsily, Aurélie [UCL]

(eng) Though Spanish and French are two Romance languages and therefore share numerous linguistic characteristics, there are some notable differences between those two languages. Spanish is a pro-drop language while French is not. However, both languages have many features in common, such as the fact that they are T/V languages (Brown & Gilman 1960). In this paper, we examine the ways in which native speakers and French-speaking learners of Spanish address their interlocutor, with a focus on the methodological issues related to analysing non-native use of address forms. We will focus on the use of address in naturalized interactions and on the factors that determine the speakers’ choice of address terms towards their interlocutors. More precisely, we will analyse the use of informal singular address tú and formal singular address usted in Spanish. The corpus is the central issue of this paper and has been compiled with video-recorded naturalized interactions between a student and a teaching assistant. This methodology is inspired by Tran (2006) and focuses on the production of spontaneous and authentic requests by students. The literature (Blum-Kulka & House 1989; Haverkate 2006; Bataller 2013) allows us to present some hypotheses, namely on the one hand, that Spanish is a more direct language than French and, on the other hand, that French-speaking learners of Spanish tend to transfer this indirectness in the L2. This would mean that Spanish native speakers use more frequently the tú form and that the French-speaking learners tend to use the formal form in the same situations. The research questions that will be tackled in this presentation include the following: (1) Which factors influence the way Spanish native and non-native speakers use address terms in naturalized interactions?
(2) How do these speakers determine the use of tú and usted in those interactions with a teaching assistant?
(3) How do the cultural differences influence the way Spanish native speakers and French-speaking learners of Spanish use address terms in Spanish? The analysis of the corpus will then shed light on the interpretation of status/power and solidarity/distance as expressed through the use of address forms in request formulations.