This thesis examines transferability of sociopragmatic knowledge to L2 speech act realization by studying request production in English and Russian. It aims at investigating whether native Russian...Show moreThis thesis examines transferability of sociopragmatic knowledge to L2 speech act realization by studying request production in English and Russian. It aims at investigating whether native Russian speakers transfer sociopragmatic knowledge to the requests in English and how they assess their linguistic behaviour in L2 compared to the performance carried out by native English speakers. To study the subject, native Russian speakers and native English speakers were asked to participate in two speech tasks: the Oral Discourse Completion (the ODCT) Test and the stimulated recall interviews (the SRI). The ODCT was aimed at elicitation of requests in eight situations that were constructed with consideration of three social parameters: social distance, power, and imposition. Native Russian speakers were asked to produce requests both in Russian and in English to detect transfer. Native English speakers produced requests in English, and their answers served as a baseline for comparison. Native Russian speakers as well as native English speakers were asked to reflect on their language use during the SRI. Three groups of requests, as well as speakers’ reports, were obtained and compared in relation to social distance, power, and imposition. The qualitative research method showed that even though there is cross-cultural variation in the Russian and English languages, sociopragmatic knowledge that is embedded in Russian culture does not affect the second language use. Russian speakers do tend to use more direct strategies in request production in the native language, as suggested by other related research on the Russian language. However, the findings of this study suggest that Russian speakers more often opted for indirect strategies, which relates their linguistic behaviour to Western tradition.Show less
In this research I have investigated the application of request strategies and application of force-mitigating or -strengthening constructions in requests for any kind of action performed in...Show moreIn this research I have investigated the application of request strategies and application of force-mitigating or -strengthening constructions in requests for any kind of action performed in English by Dutch and Israeli institutions towards their clients. In this setting, these non-native English speakers need to pragmatically adapt their linguistic performances to the untrained hierarchical setting of polite requesting towards subordinate addressees. It challenges them to conceal threats to the addressee’s face (Watts, 2005) even though no actual warmth of bond (positive politeness) or freedom to reject (negative politeness) is given. Due to the lack of formal language-training in this hierarchical setting I expected the Dutch and Israeli performances of the speech act to be influenced pragmatically by their linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The analytic approach was inspired from different fields of research: Second Language Acquisition, Linguistic Anthropology, Interlanguage and Intercultural Pragmatics. The analysed data is a collection of official letters sent out by different large institutions (universities, embassies and a hotel), of which I collected 32 letters (50 pages) in total, of which 14 letters were from Dutch sources (25 pages) and 18 letters were Israeli ones (25 pages). The letters were written solely for purposes in the work-environment and were sent in at a later moment in time, therefore the language was not affected by the speakers’ awareness of being linguistically analysed. I made use of Critical Discourse Analysis in order to investigate which linguistic features are variable in the pragmatic (illocutionary) force of requests, focussing on different request strategies (Blum-Kulka, 1987), mitigating efforts, coercives and types of reference to the interlocutors. The variations were validated by means of a statistical test for significance (z-test) and explained against the countries’ cultural backgrounds, making use of Hofstede’s method for cultural profiling with regard to power distance and uncertainty avoidance. The analysis showed that overall, the Dutch and Israeli use of request strategies and efforts in force-mitigation were surprisingly similar. The predominantly used strategy is characterised by the use of an imperative verb. Most other request utterances showed very explicit but variably less forceful strategies. Mitigators were used in relatively equal frequency, although less by the Dutch in the imperative construction. Remarkable differences were found in the overtness of speaker-reference among the Israelis, especially in more commercial settings (evoking higher politeness). In especially face-threatening situations, for instance in requesting the addressee for money without certainty the product/service being delivered, the Dutch showed a deviating strategy which converted the request into a construction of the addressee’s acceptation. The underlying processes which caused relative directness were primarily related to linguistic borrowings for the Dutch. The predominantly used strategy to request showed application of an imperative force with less mitigation efforts than the Israelis did. This suggests that the Dutch were not strongly aware of the force of their requests, which supports the idea that they adopted the imperative strategy as a direct translation (with strong syntactic similarity) of the Dutch standard question- formation, based on the verb’s stem in the clause-initial position. For the Israelis the larger variety in request strategies and lack of similarity between the predominantly encountered constructions and the Hebrew request constructions revealed no strong tendency for linguistic transfer in this untrained pragmatically-challenging setting. Although linguistic transfers are found rarely, the Israelis do demonstrate higher transfer of their cultural values, by which they strongly cherish unambiguity (by adopting relatively direct strategies) and prefer an approach of social connectedness over hierarchical deference in contexts of increased necessity for politeness.Show less
