STRATEGIES FOR REQUESTING IN SPANISH AND ENGLISH Structural Similarities and Pragmatic Differences

This paper reports on recent work in the acquisition of pragmatic competence in a second language. It centers on the speech act of requesting and the semantic strategies for conveying that speech act. First, a contrastive analysis of Spanish and English strategies is undertaken to show that basically the same strategies are available in both languages. The paper goes on to describe an experiment in which native speakers of each language were asked to judge the relative politeness of each strategy. It concludes with an examination of the frequency of use of the various strategies for conveying requests among a population of bilingual children. The findings show that, while basically the Same request strategies are available to speakers of Spanish and English, the use of those strategies differs markedly. More polite strategies are employed in speaking Spanish, while more neutral strategies are used in English.