L1 Interference in Interlanguage Pragmatics

Within the field of Second Language Acquisition, a growing interest has been devoted to interlanguage pragmatics, in particular how L2 speakers use the linguistic means by which a given language conveys politeness. Being the speech act of ‘request’ one of the most frequent and salient Face Threatening Acts, the current study investigates whether and to what extent L2 learners of Russian and Italian transfer their L1 pragmatic strategies into their L2 when required to perform a request. Qualitative and quantitative analysis has been conducted on data collected among (i) N=9 Russian L1 learners of Italian L2 via role plays and (ii) N=38 Italian L1 learners of Russian L2 via discourse completion tasks. In particular, we will compare L1 and L2 production of head acts, modification, and orientedness.