Conditional or imperative mode? The influence of mother tongue in non-native productions of French-speaking learners of Spanish
(2015) 14th International Pragmatics Conference — Location: Anvers (26.July.2015)
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- The proficiency in a target language is related not only to lexicon and grammar, but also to the adequate use of pragmatic strategies, which are crucial for an interaction without misunderstandings (Escandell Vidal 1995). An important aspect in pragmatics is the notion of politeness. According to Alonso Pérez-Ávila (2005), “one of the fundamental pragmatic aspects that L2 didactics should point out today is politeness”. Moreover, Valero Aguilar (2008: 365) adds that “it is in that aspect (politeness) that cultural diversity and socio-pragmatic errors indicate greater differences by L2 learners”. In this paper, I will analyze the pragmatic competence among French-speaking students of Spanish as a foreign language, in comparison with native speakers of Spanish. The aim of this project is to focus on how French-speaking and native students of Spanish make use of pragmatic strategies in particular situations, more concretely how they formulate requests in given situations. The focus of attention of this pilot study is on a specific topic which has been related to politeness, namely the use of the imperative vs. the conditional mode. Indeed, from a contrastive perspective, already Blum-Kulka & House (1989) have shown that, on the one hand, Spanish speakers tend to use more imperatives than French-speaking people and, on the other hand, that French-speaking people more often resort to indirect strategies. Castillo Lluch (2009), in her intercultural study, arrived at the conclusion that Spanish speakers address people in a more “informal” way, even when talking to strangers. Furthermore, there is ample research evidence that native language transfer is one of the major causes for shaping the interlanguage. That is why part of the study will be dedicated to the influence of the learners’ mother tongue. Indeed, as Tarone (2006: 748) points out, “Selinker (1972) suggested that the way in which this [mother tongue transfer] happens is that learners make ‘interlingual identifications’ in approaching the task of learning a second language: they perceive certain units as the same in their NL, IL, and TL”. Hence, my hypothesis is that French-speaking learners of Spanish will tend to overuse the conditional mode as a politeness strategy in requests, whereas Spanish native speakers will use more imperative forms. This overuse of the conditional mode by French-speaking learners might be due to the influence of their mother tongue, which they transfer in their Spanish productions. To carry out this pilot study, I will analyze requests in the Spanish informal conversation section of the CORLEC corpus as well as in a French corpus. I will confront them with non-native language productions in similar situations. I expect the learners’ use of imperative versus conditional forms to be related not only to the level of Spanish of the learners, but also to the context(s) in which the students have learned Spanish. Furthermore, I expect factors related to the request itself to play a role, namely the content of the request and the relationship with the interlocutor.
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Marsily, A. (2015). Conditional or imperative mode? The influence of mother tongue in non-native productions of French-speaking learners of Spanish. 14th International Pragmatics Conference, Anvers. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/214285