Although requests are the most widely studied speech act, there has not been extensive research on the requests produced by heritage speakers of Spanish in the United States. This study compares the requests of three groups: Spanish heritage speakers, Mexican native speakers of Spanish, and native speakers of English. The first research question examines the level of directness of the requests combined with the frequency of downgraders. The following two research questions analyzed separately the level of directness of the head act and frequency of downgrading mechanisms. Differences between the two L1 groups are found to be statistically significant for all three of the categories investigated. In contrast, the heritage speakers differ significantly from their Mexican monolingual counterparts in the level of directness of the head act, producing Spanish requests more in line with the tendency in English to employ indirect strategies. Although the heritage speakers differ from the L1 Spanish group on this one dimension, the fact that they share other characteristics with both L1 groups suggests the existence of a unique intercultural style. The findings of this study also indicate that heritage speakers display many of the same characteristics as L2 learners reported in previous research.
The objective of this study is to broaden the focus of pragmatic research to include the speech act of complaints produced by heritage speakers of Spanish. In addition to being a face-threatening act, the diverse ways in which complaints are expressed makes them a rich source for investigating how language use can vary across speech communities. Although there has been some research concerning contexts of intercultural communication, the pragmatic proficiency of heritage speakers of Spanish in the United States is an area that merits further investigation. In order to examine heritage speaker complaints, this study compares data from the following three groups: Mexican native speakers of Spanish (22), native speakers of English (40), and heritage speakers of Spanish (21). The heritage speakers and English native speakers in this study were undergraduate students at a large public university in California, while the native speakers of Spanish were university students in Mexico. All the participants completed an on-line Discourse Completion Test that included three complaint scenarios.
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