Politeness characteristics of Japanese L1/Hungarian L2 students’ utterances in the speech act of requesting

Abstract

Using data gathered through the discourse completion test, the present study investigates interlanguage requests by Hungarian L2 (at higher intermediate level)/Japanese L1 students in asking for favours and making legitimate requests with respect to external and internal modifications. These modifications have an important role in the evaluation of the politeness of the utterances. During research, the interlanguage requests were compared to their counterparts in the mother tongue and the target language. As a result, we were able to observe the influence of the mother tongue, eg. when the language learner used more external modifications compared to in the target language, when asking favours. However, when given strong hints, the students followed a target language strategy (or a strategy that can be regarded as a specific interlanguage strategy).