Pragmatic competence in Sino-speakers: a study of attenuation in colloquial conversational Spanish

Abstract

The effectiveness of Chinese Sino-speakers in communicating in Spanish depends on their pragmatic competence. However, the context of the Spanish as a foreign language classroom without linguistic immersion in China does not favor the development of this competence in Chinese students. This study seeks to characterize sociolinguistically and linguopragmatically the use of attenuation in colloquial conversational Spanish by Chinese Sino-speakers from the Faculty of Western European Languages ​​of the Chengdu Institute of the Sichuan University of International Studies to assess their pragmatic competence. To meet this objective, a colloquial conversation corpus was created with 70 Sino-speaking informants from the fourth year of Spanish Philology at said Faculty. The Briz and Albelda (2013) proposal was assumed as a methodology for the analysis of linguistic attenuation. The quantitative results obtained show that participating Chinese Sino-speaking students use attenuation as a pragmatic strategy, but resort to few and repeated mitigating tactics, which reveals a certain insufficiency in the development of mitigating pragmatic competence. The use of attenuation with pragmatic inadequacy according to the communicative situations was also verified. From a sociolinguistic point of view, men attenuate more than women.