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We present in this paper a quantitative and qualitative analysis of conversational styles through an inter and intra-linguistic study of different kinds of requests in Spanish and Italian dialogues, aiming to examine cultural characteristics in some way expressed by stylistic choices of speakers of two so closely related languages. We explore a corpus of Spanish and Italian task-oriented dialogues, in which two participants have to collaborate and cooperate to reach a common goal. Looking at the interactional dynamics oriented to obtain information to solve the task, we can observe that Spanish speakers do perform a wide variety of requests, asking for communicative contribution using yes-no questions, wh-questions and both specific and general questions. They verify interlocutor's availability to cooperate and require his/her attention on specific topics, but also only at the interactional level. On the other hand, Italian speakers tend to adopt mostly communicative strategies based on checks and yes-no questions, facing up to the task from their point of view. Comparing them with Spanish speakers, they seem to be more affected by the kind of task, so that the effort to solve it results to be decisive in establishing interactional patterns. We can see the features of two different styles, both determined by the effort to solve the task and by a good level of cooperation and involvement, even if each of them characterised by different modalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In GRIALE research group we have developed a theoretical method to explain the ironic statements in different genres (Principle of Inversion). In this paper we focus on the application of this method in ironic statements that occur in conversation, so that irony and humor coexist in a conversational exchange. Therefore, we studied not prototypical irony and humour with examples of spanish real conversations (COVJA, Corpus colloquial conversations and CREA). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]