Misunderstandings in Answering Negative Interrogatives in L2 Spanish by Chinese Learners: Pragmatic Interference, Classification and Analysis

Abstract

The production of an L2/LE could be considerably influenced not only by the linguistic aspects (phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics) of the learner’s L1, but also the pragmatic knowledge. The answering patterns of negative interrogations of Spanish differ from several Asian languages such as Chinese Mandarin, which could cause pragmatic interference for native Chinese who learn Spanish as L2/LE. This study is aimed to compare the answering patterns in two languages and to analyze the potential pragmatic interference from Chinese L1 to Spanish L2/LE from pragmatic perspectives. According to our analysis, the Spanish answering pattern prioritizes the minimum cognitive processing effort, which could be described best by Sperber & Wilson’s relevance theory, while the Chinese answering pattern prioritizes agreement maximization and conflict avoidance in conformity with Leech’s politeness maxims. We classified the misunderstanding in Chinese learners’ L2 Spanish was caused by different answering patterns between L1 and L2 according to Hinnenkamp’s criteria and Oliviera’s guidelines. This type of misunderstanding was classified as type M3 which might disturb the conversation flow, cause negative impressions and require new specifying conversation. Further didactic-orientated analysis indicates that this misunderstanding is culturally related and could have been avoided with appropriate explications.