More on Dutch English ... please? : a study of request performance by Dutch native speakers, English native speakers and Dutch learners of English

摘要

The purpose of the study is to investigate similarities and differences in the use of politeness strategies in formulating requests between Dutch learners of English, native speakers of Dutch and native speakers of English. A second objective was to gain more insights into the influence of sociocultural factors such as power distance and social distance between speaker and hearer and situational variation on the use of request strategies. The main conclusion is that respondents were very similar in their use of request strategies, but varied in the way they modified their requests. Although respondents used the full range of request strategies available for making requests, they clearly preferred highly indirect, safe strategies. Respondents varied with respect to both total amount and types of request modification they included in their requests. At the most general level the learners of English are able to communicate pragmatic intent indirectly and are able to vary the directness level of their requests by using the major realization strategies for requests in English. In addition, they are able to use syntactic and lexical/phrasal means to modify the impact of requests and are also able support their requests with external modifiers. Finally, they are able to vary the directness level and the request modification of their requests relative to differences in situational variables such as authority, social distance and context. The learners appeared to have undermodified their requests with respect to both syntactic as well as lexical/phrasal modification. In addition, they used a relatively narrow range of modifiers compared with the native speakers. In general, the learners appear to make use of what might be called a standard pattern of modification consisting of past tense modals and politeness marker 'please', which they seem to routinely apply in the reduction of the impositive