Cultural Conceptualizations in Compliment Responses of English-Speaking Learners of Italian

This chapter examines compliment responses of American English learners of Italian and the effects of cultural pragmatic schemas of L1 on L2. According to cross-cultural pragmatic studies in the field of compliments comparing English and Italian, Americans would mainly express agreement being concerned for the face of the hearer, whilst Italian speakers would look for a compromise between agreement and modesty—they would try to show appreciation for the compliment received and at the same time to appear humble. Compared to speakers of American English, Italians rarely select direct or transparent acceptation, which is the preferred answer in Anglo-American cultures. Most strategies used by Italians belong to restricted or opaque acceptance which shows a clear desire on the part of the speaker to avoid self-praise, and, at the same time, to accept the compliment. The main strategies include minimizing or shifting the compliment (for example, attributing the merit for the item complimented to external factors such as donors or family traditions) or scaling down compliments. Negating compliments is very rare in Italian and is generally expressed in a humorous or ironic way. The study applies a Discourse Completion Test based on the model offered in Sharifian (2008) to collect data from three groups: a group of Italian native speakers, a group of American English native speakers and a group of American learners of Italian. Since the learners belong to different proficiency levels, some generalizations can be drawn about the correlation between language competence and knowledge of cultural pragmatic schemas in L2. The data show that the cultural schema of pride, associated with overt emotional expression, appears with strong evidence in the answers of American learners of Italian, as opposed to compliment responses provided by Italian native speakers, characterized mainly by the pragmatic schema of modesty. Pragmatically appropriate answers appear sporad- ically and only in the production of advanced learners, demonstrating the necessity to focus on the development of pragmatic skills in the foreign language classroom. The chapter concludes by arguing that L2 learners should not only acquire language skills and communicative skills, but they should also develop metacultural competence to be able to communicate efficiently and negotiate their cultural conceptualizations while using a foreign language.