(No) need for clarity – Facework in Spanish and German refusals

• The analysis shows a slightly higher frequency of direct refusals in German.
• Indirect refusals in Spanish are often related to external factors like time.
• Affinity to the proposal plays an important role in German indirect refusals.
• Unclear final outcomes are more frequent in Spanish than in German.

Given the linguistic complexity and the great impact a refusal can produce on the speaker's and hearer's face, this speech act has been the object of numerous comparative works on cross-cultural communication studies. This article compares the culture-specific realisation of different types of refusals in Spanish and German, a language pair that has not yet received much attention in the field of intercultural pragmatics. It presents a brief review of published works on the expression of refusals in different languages and describes in detail the threat that a refusal poses for the positive and negative face of both interlocutors.The analysis of the culture-specific means to manage this face threat reveals a high tendency for indirect refusal strategies and for vague answers without a clear final outcome by Spanish speakers, whereas German speakers place a higher value on more direct refusal strategies and explicit answers with a great level of pragmatic clarity, especially with regard to the final outcome of the conversation.