Le risposte ai complimenti tra donne moldave in Italia. Sistemi pragmatici a confronto in un contesto plurilingue

The aim of this study was to compare compliment responses among Moldavian women living either in Moldavia or in Italy. The corpus consisted of 120 speech acts containing complimenting, half for each sub-group of participants. When compared to Moldavian women living in Moldavia, those living in Italy consider compliments more dangerous in terms of face-balancing; therefore, they adopt a different pragmatic behavior and tend to respond using limited acceptance. This pragmatic change is probably due to hypercorrectness, in an attempt to follow the idealized Italian model of the pragmatic management of the compliment. Moreover, responses with limited acceptance tend to contain code-switching phenomena, from Russian (the language in which the compliments are offered) to Moldavian, as a renegotiation of the language of the conversation. This way, participants use the bilingualism at their disposal as a tool to protect their positive face.