Richiedere in italiano L1 e L2: strategie di modulazione della forza illocutoria

In this paper requests of information and suggestions performed by native and non-native speakers of Italian are compared with regard to the textual, morphosyntactic and lexical devices used for mitigating the illocutionary force of their speech acts. The corpus consists of telephone conversations in which the informants must obtain information and suggestions from unknown interlocutors in order to complete some communicative tasks. The analysis shows that there are subtle though significant differences between the performances of the two groups of speakers. The native speakers use plenty of linguistic devices that make them appear cautious in assigning obligations to their addressees, whereas the learners tend to underuse such devices, and give the impression of being little concerned with mitigating the assigned obligations.