NEGATION IN SPANISH AND ENGLISH SUGGESTIONS AND REQUESTS - MITIGATING EFFECTS

Negation in speech acts has been identified in past studies as an element that can be used to mitigate the effect of an utterance. The objective of this study is to examine the use of negation in requests and suggestions, principally using data from Spanish and English. It is shown that negation does not always serve to communicate politeness or mitigation in all speech acts, and in fact, may have the opposite effect. The notions of positive and negative politeness posited by Brown and Levinson (1987) do account for many uses of negation in suggestions, and in fact, shed light on the nature of interrogative suggestions in general. They do not apply as easily to requests, however, in that they do not account for differences in force created by the negative in both languages. The data are also examined in terms of what they reveal about the mitigation of suggestions and requests through implicature.