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Pragmatics: Online-First Articles

Modifying requests in a foreign language

A longitudinal study of Australian learners of Chinese

ORCID logo | University of Tasmania
This longitudinal study examines the pragmatic development of Australian learners of Chinese in their use of internal modifiers of requests over the course of a semester. An eight-situation DCT was used to collect data. A perception questionnaire and informal interviews were also used to aid the interpretation of the data. Results indicate that despite considerable pragmalinguistic development in some areas, learners’ overall use of Chinese internal modifiers still lagged far behind that of native speakers. Moreover, there was only a little evidence of situational variation. Hence this study suggests the precedence of pragmalinguistic over sociopragmatic development. The study adds to the small but growing body of research on pragmatic development in L2 Chinese.
Keywords: request, internal modifier, syntactic downgrader, lexical/phrasal downgrader, Chinese
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Requests
    • 2.2Research on interlanguage pragmatic development
      • 2.2.1Cross-sectional studies
      • 2.2.2Longitudinal studies
    • 2.3Research on L1 and L2 Chinese requests
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Instruments
    • 3.3Data collection procedure
    • 3.4Data coding and analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Pragmalinguistic development
      • 4.1.1Overall use of internal modifiers
      • 4.1.2Syntactic downgraders
      • 4.1.3Lexical/phrasal downgraders
    • 4.2Sociopragmatic development
      • 4.2.1Power
      • 4.2.2Rank of imposition
    • 4.3Judgement of appropriateness
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 21 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.22015.li
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