“I don ́t know how to say it in Portuguese without sounding so disrespectful”- the act of criticism in the interlanguage of non-native Portuguese speakers

• Autor(a) principal: Fernando Salema, Luís
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Outros Autores: Carapinha, Conceição
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.21747/21833958/red11a9
• topic: Pragmática da Interlíngua; Ato ilocutório de censura; Speech act set; Estratégias de modificação; Falhas pragmáticas; Interlanguage Pragmatics; Speech act of criticism; Speech act set; Peripheral modification devices; Pragmatic failures

There are few studies in the framework of Interlanguage Pragmatics on how foreign language  learners  produce  the  illocutionary  speech  act  of  criticism.  This  is  a  demanding  act,  as  it  threatens  the  interlocutor’s  face,  leading  to  negative  emotions,  and  with  implications  regarding  interpersonal relationships. With focus on a pragmatic perspective, this study aims to analyse the illocutionary  speech  act  of  criticism  in  a  formal  and  asymmetrical  context  produced  by  learners  of Portuguese as a foreign language. Through a set of oral productions by B1 level students in the project CORal-Cocorpus, and Nguyen’s (2005) model as support, the present analysis intends to (i) identify the direct and indirect intentions of the act of criticism, (ii) list the semantic formulas used by learners, (iii) evaluate the modification strategies students used and (iv) present a proposal for the prototypical structure of this speech act set produced by those learners. The results point to a continuum between the act of criticism and the act of request. There is also evidence of two critical areas in the production of that act, one related to the erroneous use regarding formal and informal language (forms of address) and the other is caused by the coexistent use of strategies that lead to mitigation and intensification.