Pragmatic Competence and Transferability: Native and Non-Native Speakers of Portuguese

211 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1998.A speaker's linguistic and cultural identity as well as length of residence in a second language environment proved major factors contributing to her/his choices of discourse strategies in the L2. Data suggested that contact with a second language and community also influences the speaker's attitude and linguistic choices in interactions in his/her own L1. Findings from the present study question the current view of the relevance of "native speaker competence" in second language acquisition literature. The study points out the implications of the coexistence of two or more language systems in a speaker's mind and their influence on his/her sociocultural values and sociopragmatic decisions when speaking either of the two languages.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD