Cultural Stereotypes about Spain and Germany: a Metapragmatic Analysis of (Dis)agreement Based upon a Cross-Cultural Interview

Abstract

In the following pages we present, describe and analyse a communicative event in the form of a videotaped interview between three copresent subjects who possess a common cross-cultural background in Spanish and German language (and culture). The interview, focused on the discussion of certain widely spread stereotypes in and about these two cultures, offers a sample of (semi)spontaneous speech in German. A metapragmatic view of the collected data (Verschueren, 2012) will allow us to characterize, from an integrative –discursive and multimodal– perspective, some of the interactional strategies that surface in the process of negotiating stereotypes and that shape successive acts of agreement and disagreement on two levels: that of the interviewees versus the stereotypes and that of one interviewee versus the other. These two axes of analysis, in which the main discursive and multimodal movements of the interviewees will be described, are the backbone of this paper, which is completed with a review of the concept of cultural stereotype as it is found in studies on interculturality in the Spanish-German context.