Abstract
Research in the fields of pragmatics has highlighted important differences in speech act realisation strategies and the perception of contextual variables across lingua-cultures. This particularly applies for requests, which are potentially face-threating acts and important expressions of cultural behaviour, as their performance is influenced by culturally-embedded perspectives on rights and obligations. Although some languages have been widely investigated in terms of request realisation, such as English, little research has been done on Italian. This study examines request realisation strategies in Italian, in terms of Head Acts and request perspective, and the impact of the sociopragmatic factors of social distance and weight of imposition of the request on strategy choice amongst eight Italian speakers, by means of open-ended roleplays. The data was analysed by using a coding scheme based on Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1984) and revealed that the Italian speakers where more influenced by social distance, which in turn impacted on the choice of request perspective. They were shown to prefer using hearer-orientation, which reflected in the verb conjugation of the Head Acts, since this perspective allows them to do relational work with the hearer, by either addressing the recipient with the familiar tu or with the formal lei.
About the author
Valentina Bartali is a 4th year PhD student at the University of Warwick, Applied Linguistics, awarded with a fully-funded EU Chancellor scholarship, who passed her PhD viva on the 5th of May 2022.
Her interests concern Cross-cultural/Intercultural pragmatics, Discourse Analysis, Politeness and Diachronic studies, and her research investigate Italian and English request realisation strategies from an intracultural, cross-cultural and intercultural perspective, with the aim to tease out culturally-based differences in request performance, participants’ evaluations of own and others’ linguistic behaviours and the (moral-grounded) reasons behind them.
She graduated from the University of Florence (Italy) with a LLM degree in 2007 and became a lawyer in 2010. After a few years of legal profession and some experience as English teacher to Italian adults, she moved (back) to England in 2015, to do a Master in TESOL and Translation studies at Aston University. She graduated with a Merit in 2017.
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List of appendices
Appendix 1: List of roleplay scenarios, with instructions (English version) [8]
Appendix 2: Retrospective interviews’ questions guide (English version)
Appendix 1: List of roleplay scenarios, with instructions (English version)
Appendix 2: Retrospective interviews’ questions guide (English version)
© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
