Subestrategies and Internal Mitigators in Requests Used by English Learners
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32870/vel.vi22.208Keywords:
speech acts, requests, English, sociopragmatic, pragmalinguisticAbstract
Requests are speech acts that are part of everyday interactions. A request takes place when a speaker produces a message in order to have the listener do an action that benefits the speaker (Blum-Kulka & Olshtain, 1984) and they can be direct ('Give me a glass of water') or indirect ('I am thirsty’). Since requests are considered face-threatening speech acts (Brown & Levinson, 1987), it is tended to use strategies to mitigate their illocutive force. The objective of this article is to describe the pragmalinguistic resources (substrategies and internal mitigators) used by Mexican students of English, at the B1 level, request, in English, in different contexts related to the following contextual variables: social power, social distance and level of intensity of requests. To collect the corpus of this research, online questionnaires were applied to English learners, on the Google Forms platform, with situations to elicit requests in English. The results show that the learners are still developing their pragmalinguistic competence; that is, they do not have a wide variety of linguistic resources to request in their target language.
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