(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.