To master the English language, non-native speakers must possess not only linguistic, but also pragmatic competence. As a speech act study, this master’s thesis explores how Slovene speakers realize requests in English and offers insight into their pragmatic competence by comparing their request strategies with native speakers of the English language. Data were elicited using a discourse completion test with five situations and analysed according to coding categories as presented by Schauer (2009). Firstly, requests were classified based on their directness. Slovene speakers are generally familiar with the notion of conventionalized indirectness, but they nonetheless over-use direct strategies, which is an instance of negative transfer from the Slovene language. Such findings confirm that the high correlation between directness and politeness is not a universal phenomenon. Secondly, the study of internal and external modification shows that Slovene speakers show great variety in their choice of modifiers and generally realize them as frequently as native speakers. However, they tend to do so with different intentions and in different contexts than native speakers.
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