How to Start a Request? A Contrastive Study of Alerters in Spanish by Speakers of L1 Spanish and L1 French

What is it about?

This study analyses one of the aspects of requests formulation, i.e. alerters. These are elements that precede the request head act and serve to get the attention of the hearer of the request. We compare requests formulated by L1 speakers of Spanish and L2 speakers of Spanish with L1 French. The selected corpus comprises Discourse Completion Tests and Naturalised Interactions. Our data reveal that there are statistically significant differences in the use of alerters from Spanish L1 and L2 speakers in the DCTs but not in the Naturalised Interactions. Alerters occur with rather similar frequencies in both groups, but there are qualitative differences as to which forms are adopted. At the methodological level, we highlight that data obtained from both groups’ DCTs vs. Naturalised Interactions show different results, thus underlining the importance of combined methods for contrastive pragmatics research.

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