Publications

Publication details [#54277]

Publication type
Article in book
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins

Annotation

Suggestions are acts in which the speaker asks the hearer to perform an action that will potentially benefit the hearer (Rintell, 1979). Despite this fact, they have been regarded as face-threatening acts, since the speaker is in some way intruding into the hearer’s world by performing an act that concerns what the latter should do (Brown & Levinson, 1987). For this reason, formulating pragmatically appropriate suggestions that do not result in impolite or rude behaviour may be especially difficult for second language learners whose contact with the target language is very limited. With that aim in mind, and based on previous studies on this speech act, this paper proposes a pedagogical approach that ranges from awareness-raising to production activities.