The Acquisition of Tú and Usted by English Speakers
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Georgia State University The Acquisition of Tú and Usted by English Speakers A Study of Non-native Knowledge and Usage of Forms of Address Luke Smith 4/27/2012 P a g e | 1 Abstract This study is an attempt to trace the tendencies of L2 learners of Spanish in identifying the explicitly alien distinction between the pronouns tú and usted . This "T/V" distinction is an important factor in social communications given the two pronouns' differing connotations, the "T" pronoun, tú being more casual, while the "V" pronoun usted being more formal. Here I overview the survey responses of three groups of students (native, advanced, and intermediate speakers) to find patterns in the usage of the two pronouns in various types of requests differentiated by different social factors. Participants are given hypothetical situations in which they must press a request to another speaker, each situation with either a power gap between speakers, a unfamiliarity or a particularly grave request. They are asked to reply with the pronoun they would more likely use in every case. It is found that advanced and intermediate students have a generally good grasp of natives' usage of the pronouns at least in recognition of proper usage, yet generalization remains difficult due to a small sample size and perhaps the recognition-based methodology. It is also found that a power gap between the speakers universally elicits the use of the usted pronoun, while the gravity of a request does not make a speaker more likely to use the same pronoun instead of tú. There is a variance in both native and non-native speakers as to whether or not unfamiliarity between speakers requires the usage of usted. Additionally I review the theoretical, cognitive and cultural possibilities of an extension of this result and comment on their ramifications with suggestions for further research. Literature and Background P a g e | 2 Most languages exhibit an small inventory of pronouns dedicated to the lexical space filled by the English you. Besides plurality, most extant languages bear at least two levels of possible entries on the formal-informal continuum. This very common distinction is typically referred to as the Tu/Vous Distinction, or the T/V Distinction after the French pronouns (informal and formal respectively). The choices of usage of these two (or more) forms is an important decision somewhere between grammar and pragmatics as it exists in essentially all languages apart from English (which has recently lost the distinction) and various lesser- spoken languages of Africa, Australia and the New World. As an aside, there does seem to exist enlightening parallels in the development of polite forms of second person pronouns. For a sizable number of languages, the 2P polite singular pronoun is in fact derived from or the same as the 2P plural pronoun; this list includes Persian “shomâ”, French “vous”, Arabic “antum”, Tamil “ningal” and historically English “you, ye” (among many others). It would be interesting to note that there seems to be an interlingual and intercultural tendency to polite speech via the “indirectness” that the plural pronoun might give. The Spanish Situation Nonetheless, the specific case of Spanish does not yield a polite pronoun resulting from the plural form. While tú is derived directly from the Latin tu, usted is a more recent innovation which was originally a contraction of vuestra merced “your mercy.” The verbal paradigm must reflect which pronoun is intended even if the pronoun is dropped: one must say tú tienes “you have,” and usted tiene “your mercy has.” Thus even though Spanish is a pro- drop language, without the mention of pronouns the speaker still must choose whether to address his hearer as T or V. Even one-word imperatives must reflect the T/V distinction: one must say ven “come” with the implication of tú or venga “come” with the implication of usted. P a g e | 3 Theoretically the only way a command or request can be pressed without choosing one or the other is the use of hinting a request or ambiguously indirect speech. Dialectical Notes Generally, usted is used in reference to strangers, elders and social superiors while tú is used with friends, children and lower classes, although there is variation among individual speakers (Lambert 1976). Still, many areas violate these pragmatic generalizations so consistently that it is typically considered a difference in dialect. In some areas usted is nigh universal; in the Spanish of Bogotá, Colombia and well as in Costa Rica usted is becoming more and more common in situations of politeness and solidarity, thus replacing tú entirely by some accounts. In Diane 1985 it is reasoned that, in many cases, the T/V distinction of Colombian Spanish is being replaced by a “V/T/V” distinction in which usted can be used as a sign of intimate respect. However outside of these anomalous areas, the vitality of tú is unquestionable. In some locals, notably Spain, tú is a common form of address even for strangers and sometimes elders. Although in general, there appears a grand uniformity in the intentions of tú and usted, various communities are wont to use them in different circumstances. These differences must be kept in mind for any study on Spanish speakers, although perhaps in the Sprachbund of the United States the dialectical differences diverge. As a final note, there exists the pronoun vos which is typically a dialectical equivalent of tú in some regions of Central and South America. In literature, it can be used as archaism or literary form (Almasov 1974), but in most cases it bears the same informality as tú. Usage of vos is comparatively rare in the Spanish spoken in the United States however. In Language Acquisition P a g e | 4 Research on Spanish pragmatics has been thus far both plentiful and scarce. Although much ink has been spilt in explaining general pragmatics, even on the T/V distinction, those studies studying its usage at the hands of L2 learners are few and far-between, and often dated. In pedagogy, the scenario might be even more muddled; Poe as far back as 1958 notes that in many elementary Spanish classrooms, tú and usted are used in curricula without any distinction, and elementary schools often teach their students to respond to usted forms (while the same would be rare of in an actual Spanish-speaking country). In addition, it is worth noting that there have been several scholarly observations of L2 learners of French and German in somewhat similar contexts. Belz 2003 finds that when corrected by native German speakers in a learning context, intermediate-advanced students quickly and totally change their T/V usage to mimic that correction: although originally referring to German tutors with Sie (V), all students would use du (T) when told so. Of course, this only traces the usage in one specific context where the usage would have been unambiguous. Some findings of Shivley 2011 found that study-abroad Spanish learners in Spain would not change their usage of the two forms as a result of their experience, although this may be to their native-like at the beginning of the study. Questions Thus, with this all said, it should be of considerable interest to understand the preciseness of L2 learners’ grasp of the T/V distinction in Spanish. Any study set to test this, however, needs to simultaneously develop at least a tentative standard with which to compare, and thus native speakers should be employed as well for contrasting. The goal of this study is to approximate the social conditions under which tú and usted are used among Spanish speakers for the purpose of showing how non-native speakers in an English-speaking community can catch onto this division which is absent explicitly in English. P a g e | 5 Also informally, the sway of direct teaching in pragmatics would be interesting to analyze, especially given the results of Belz 2003 mentioned above. Thus the data will be analyzed for (1) Non-natives’ proximity to native norms (2) How native norms themselves are determined and (3) speculation as to the effects of direct instruction. Methodology Three groups of Spanish speakers shall be selected, each of 4 to 5 members: one of native speakers, one group classified as intermediate learners and still another classified as advanced. These groups will be given a questionnaire of 14 questions in which they are asked simple to read a different speech act situation (all requests) for each and mark whether they would use tú or usted in referring to the other interlocutor. To differentiate the social contexts of the questionnaire, all fourteen questions will have a combination of either a long social distance, a particularly grave request, a social power gap between the speakers, none, or a combination of two. This way, if native speakers necessarily demonstrate ustedeo in circumstances of a power gap, but not in situations solely with grave requests, such results can be compared to the production of NNS. Thus all together the survey shall be composed of the following kinds of questions: 1. Two testing exclusively the effects of a large social distance (SD) 2. Two testing exclusively the effects of a particularly grave request (GR) 3. Two testing exclusively the effects of a social power gap (PG) 4. Two testing SD and GR 5. Two testing GR and PG 6. Two testing SD and PG 7. Two testing none P a g e | 6 The segregation of intermediate and advanced Spanish learners is important in the specific context of Georgia State University as well; to be classified as an advanced student, one must have completed the course “Advanced Grammar 3303” in which students are explicitly guided through general usage of tú and usted at least in basic context if they had not been before.