The use of English requests by native Spanish speakers and its relation to politeness values

There are different modes of interaction between speakers. Some of these differences reflect an individual style of speech behavior but very often, variation in interaction is deeply rooted in the sociocultural norms of speaking of the speaker and the hearer. Universal pragmatic principles, such as being cooperative or show politeness, exist in all languages and cultures but how these principles are manifested through the use of language is linguistically and culturally determined.In this dissertation I investigate the request realization patterns under different social constraints of two different languages, Peninsular Spanish and American English, by both native and non-native speakers. An open-ended questionnaire was designed to trigger request responses to a set situations where two contextual variables were combined (i.e., Familiarity and Power). A metapragmatic assessment questionnaire was also included to compare the subjects' perceptions of the social situations used for eliciting requests. The responses obtained were analyzed in terms of types of request strategies selected, level of directness, use of supportive moves, perspective taking and politeness manifestation. The results showed that Peninsular Spanish speakers were more direct in their responses followed by second language learners and native American English speakers respectively. All groups of speakers preferred to select direct request strategies in contexts where the speaker was in a powerful situation towards the hearer. Finally, a variation in the type of linguistic expressions displaying politeness values was observed between the native and the non-native groups.U of I OnlyETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permissio