Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Perspectives on the Emotional and Pragmatic Expression of Sympathy in Spanish and English

Where there is suffering, there is sympathy: The speech act Sympathize in learning Chinese as a foreign language

“…Previous research on the speech act Sympathize has been carried out along three topics: strategies for expressing sympathy in a specific language (e.g., García, 2010; Pudlinski, 2005), cross‐cultural comparisons of the way people express sympathy (e.g., Morady Moghaddam, 2012; Wakefield & Itakura, 2017), and acquisitional studies on the performance of the speech act Sympathize by foreign language learners (e.g., Meiners, 2017; Nakajima, 2002). In this section, we focus on the first of these three topics.…”

“…Meiners (2017) investigated expressions of sympathy by Spanish native speakers, English native speakers, and English learners of Spanish. Meiners found that Spanish native speakers preferred to use a greater variety of sympathy expressions, exclamations, and interjections, while English native speakers tended to use the formulaic expression “I'm sorry” without elaboration.…”

“…The speech act Sympathize, which is at the center of this paper, also challenges foreign language learners. As defined by House and Kádár (2021, p. 111), Sympathize is “an appropriate response whenever the speaker hears that something unfortunate has happened to the addressee.” The ability to sympathize with others is essential for humans since it allows interactants to initiate and maintain social bonds with each other (Meiners, 2017). However, deciding whether to express sympathy and, if so, how to display it is a crucial issue for language users, as commiserations might be “unwelcome if they are felt to intrude on the private feelings of the recipient” (Leech, 2014, p. 212).…”

“…However, deciding whether to express sympathy and, if so, how to display it is a crucial issue for language users, as commiserations might be “unwelcome if they are felt to intrude on the private feelings of the recipient” (Leech, 2014, p. 212). Although many scholars have investigated how people perform the speech act Sympathize in various languages (e.g., García, 2010; Meiners, 2017; Wakefield et al., 2019), regrettably, research on this speech act is still in its infancy. Since realizing Sympathize may require linguistic proficiency, the current study is set to investigate the production of the speech act Sympathize with advanced CFL learners as a case.…”

La expresión de condolencias en cartas canarias del siglo XVIII

“…Al-Shboul y Maros (2013), Behnam et al (2013), Farnia (2011, Kongo y Gyasi (2015), Kuang (2015Kuang ( , 2017Kuang ( , 2018, Murad (2013), y Williams (2006 se valen fundamentalmente de fuentes escritas (SMS, emails, posts de Facebook) en sus análisis. Otros estudios, como los de Janusheva y Neshkovska (2018), Lotfollahi y Eslami-Rasekh (2011), Meiners (2013) Morady Moghaddam (2012), Nurlianingsih e Imperiani (2020), Pishghadam y Morady Moghaddam (2013), Samavarchi y Allami (2012), Sharif et al (2018), Wakefield et al (2020), Wakefield y Itakura (2017), Williams (2006), o Yahya (2009, utilizan metodologías que permiten aproximarse un poco más a la realización oral de este acto de habla, como son la DCT antes mencionada o el análisis de diálogos de películas. La mayor parte de estos trabajos estudian lenguas de Asia, en muchos casos en contraste con el inglés, por el interés que esta comparación tiene para el aprendizaje del inglés como lengua extranjera.…”