| After prolonged exposure to mainland United States English and culture, return migrant Puerto Ricans face adaptation problems upon reinsertion into the nonmigrant Island community. A cross-cultural approach within the context of interlanguage pragmatics combining quantitative and qualitative methods was used to investigate areas of successful communication and sources of potential conflict in the apology speech act realizations and interpretations of the two groups.; Integrating natural observation, questionnaires, role-play, rating scales, and interviews with bi-cultural experts and informants, this mixed-design study compared the Spanish apologies of 15 Puerto Rican female high school return migrants (RMS) to three critical incidents, with those of 10 nonmigrant Island Puerto Ricans (NMS) in the San Juan Metropolitan Area. The NMS data was used as baseline for comparison. Analysis of participants' apology strategy choices showed that while the groups' apologies were very similar in semantic and syntactic formulas, there were important differences in at least three of nine strategies used Potential for pragma-linguistic and/or socio-pragmatic communication failure were found in 26 out of 45 RMS' responses.; Selected apology responses to the three situations enacted were evaluated by 50 NMS on semantic differential scales for commonness, appropriateness, respectfulness, and directness. Analysis of the results indicated significant differences among responses ratings on all scales in two out of three situations and on three out of four scales in one situation. Bilingual bi-cultural experts and group members were interviewed to explain the results. Analysis of their interpretations revealed similar, constrasting and/or conflicting differences in the norms and values underlying pragmatic behavior in the two speech communities. RMS and NMS were very much alike in their realizations of apologies, yet, the differences that exist between them can cause serious communication problems, some of which may result in cross-cultural stereotyping. Examples of areas identified with potential for socio-pragmatic failure include different approaches to handling conflict (indirect vs. confrontational), different emphasis on social (trust and sharing) and personal (responsibility and accountability) values in handling possessions, and indiscriminate use of endearment terms resulting from the overgeneralization of an Island Puerto Rican norm. |
