PRETTY PLEASE: CORTESY STRATEGIES OF HERITAGE SPEAKERS OF MEXICAN SPANISH

Abstract

The present study investigates the formation of petitions of 30 university students who have acquired Spanish as a heritage language, comparing their strategies of linguistic courtesy with those seen in the petitions of 30 native-speakers from northern Mexico. The formation of the petition is analyzed as they are faced with writing to hypothetical interlocutors using four different measures of linguistic courtesy: (1) form of address, (2) directness of the head act, (3) use of positive courtesy strategies, and (4) use of negative courtesy strategies. Results suggest that participants follow the monolingual norm with respect to form of address and the formation of the head act, exhibiting stylistic variation according to the dynamics of power and social distance of the interlocuters, but that there are subtle differences in the use of positive and negative strategies in comparison to the native-speakers, which supports the inclusion of explicit pragmatics instruction in the teaching of Spanish as a heritage language.