University of Pardubice Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

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Publication detail

Internal request mitigation in Czech students’ spoken English

Authors: Huschová Petra

Year: 2021

Type of publication: ostatní - přednáška nebo poster

Page from-to: nestránkováno

Titles:

Language	Name	Abstract	Keywords
eng	Internal request mitigation in Czech students’ spoken English	This paper examines pragmalinguistic resources in requests produced by Czech university learners of English, particularly in requests for information extracted from the Corpus of Czech Students’ Spoken English. It is concerned with patterns of modification which make requests indirect and soften their requestive force, focusing on internal modifiers. The analysis of indirect requests recorded in student-student dialogues, designed as information transfer tasks, examines syntactic downgraders, a subcategory of internal modifiers, which mitigate the speech act of request by syntactic means. It explores their distribution and use in three conventionally indirect request strategies, namely query preparatory, declarative wish statement and hedged performative. The findings indicate that Czech learners’ pragmalinguistic competence in request production shows drawbacks concerning syntactic structure of more complex requests and choices of mitigating devices; when requesting information, students tend to depend on a limited range of familiar structures.	request for information; internal modification; syntactic downgrader; non-native spoken discourse