From May You? To Do you Mind? A Case Study of ILP Development in Requests

Abstract

This is a case study about interlanguage pragmatic (ILP) development in speech acts of request based on natural as well as elicited data from a 12-year-old chinese girl (Amy) over the period of her seven-month stay in tlawai'i. The two research questions are: (a) To what extent did Amy's performance in requests change over time with regard to request realization strategies and modification (b) How was Amy's request development identical with or different from the participants in previous studies? The analysis and results of the data show that in request strategres there is a shift from conventional indirectness to directness and nonconventional indirectness in accordance with the degree of request imposition and obligation/right of the interlocutors, but no variation is observed with respect to the social distance between the interlocutors. For request modification the politeness marker please is consistently the primary internal modification device, and there is a decrease in the use of grounders in external modification over the time. Amy's early reliance on speech formulas, the overwhelming use of conventional indirect strategies ard the politeness marker please, the improvernent in strategies prior to that in realizational linguistic means, the imitation learning strategy, and the function of conscious noticing are consistent with the findings in previous studies. However, the acquisitional sequence of requestive strategies the sensitivity of some situational factors, and the decrease in the use of grounders are aspects different from previous studies.