This study of request sequence production in immersed Swedish speakers of L2 English and L2 French in employee-employer task role play, reveals that both groups significantly underutilise lexical and syntactic downgraders and 'situation-bound’ routinized formulaic sequences for expressing the Head act, due to, in the former case, a phenomenon of a socio-pragmatic nature, and in the latter, a lack of pragmalinguistic resources.