Cross-cultural Analysis of Congratulations in American English, Indian English and Peninsular Spanish

Sammanfattning: To gain a better understanding of intercultural communication, it is relevant to study speech acts not only in different languages but also across different language varieties. Seeing as speech act studies are said to have suffered from Anglocentrism there is a necessity to include nonwestern cultures (Wierzbicka, 1985:145). The current study seeks to gain an understanding of the understudied speech act of congratulations in two different varieties of English (American and Indian). In addition, to gain further insights and move away from the aforementioned Anglocentrism, Peninsular Spanish will also be investigated. The questions that have guided this research are: 1) What type of congratulation strategies do the respondents report using? 2) To what extent do the variables of power and social distance seem to influence the congratulation performance? 3) To what extent are there similarities and differences between the respondents with respect to the reported congratulation strategies? To identify the strategies, a modified version of Elwood’s (2004) taxonomy on congratulations was used. Data was gathered through Discourse Completion Tests (DCT) completed by 90 respondents from North America, India and Spain offering congratulations in nine different situations. The results indicated that different strategies are applied by the groups depending on situation and/or variables. For instance, North Americans and Spaniards are more likely to express happiness and Indians are more likely to offer good wishes.