GERMAN NATIVE SPEAKERS’ USE OF MODIFICATION DEVICES OF THE SPEECH ACT OF REQUEST

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the different strategies and linguistic forms that native speakers of German use to express the speech act of request. It presents the findings of an introductory study of the most common modification devices they use to formulate their requests. First, we give a short description of the research we conducted. Then, we present the findings focusing on the modification devices used in a variety of different situations. In particular, we focus on their dependence on the variables of power, social distance and degree of imposition. We also illustrate our findings with examples from the pool of speech acts that we collected.