Ik heb een kleine dienst je te vragen... : verzoeken in de tussentaal van Franstalige NVT-leerders

This dissertation examines how French-speaking learners of Dutch as a foreign language express politeness in requests compared to native speakers of Dutch and French. The main questions of this exploratory study are: • What are the similarities and differences between the requests made by intermediate-level learners of Dutch and native speakers of Dutch? • To what extent does the mother tongue influence the formulation of the request utterance in the foreign language? The data were collected from two groups: 24 Belgian native speakers of French who are studying Dutch as a foreign language and 24 Belgian native speakers of Dutch. The requests were collected by means of interactive role plays in which the participants were asked to play 8 different situations. The situations varied along two dimensions: power/social distance (situations with a professor vs. situations with a student) and degree of imposition of the request (high imposition vs. low imposition). A questionnaire was elaborated in order to compare the cultural differences in the assessment of the variables power/distance and imposition. In addition, a retrospective interview was conducted to identify the strategies used by the learners in order to mitigate their requests in the foreign language. The results were interpreted in terms of strategies (e.g. Can I…? vs I would like…), internal modification of the request utterance (lexical and morphosyntactic means which soften the request, e.g. use of modal particles, past tense) and external modification (utterances which soften the request, like reasons or apologies). A quantitative analysis showed that the learners significantly overuse statements (e.g. "Ik zou graag…", "Misschien kan ik…") to the detriment of queries (e.g. "Kunt u…?", "Is het mogelijk…?"). The learners were also found to make less frequent use of internal and external modification compared to the control group of native speakers. Finally, a closer examination of the data revealed interesting qualitative differences regarding the words and formulae used by the learners. Turning to the second research question, the findings suggested that negative pragmalinguistic transfer can only account to a limited extent for the differences between learners and native speakers of the target language. In addition, it was found that negative sociopragmatic transfer does not occur. The interview revealed that the explanation for the differences between interlanguage and target language lies in two additional factors: extra processing effort required to add internal and external modification and lack of formulae. In those conditions, the learners showed a preference for clarity and unambiguous means of expression.(GERM 3) -- UCL, 201