A Pragmalinguistic Analysis of Request External and Internal Modification Strategies: The case of Moroccan University Students of English

This study investigates how Moroccan university students of English use modification strategies to either mitigate or aggravate their requests as compared to American native speakers of English. The data were collected by means of a written discourse completion task and were analyzed quantitatively based on Faerch and Kasper’s (1989) typology of request modification categories. The analysis showed significant differences between American native speakers and Moroccan university students at the level of external and internal modification. While Americans used more mitigating supportive moves, Moroccans’ requests displayed more lexical/phrasal downgraders. However, the differences at the level of alerters, syntactic downgraders, upgraders, and aggravating supportive moves were not significant. The study concludes with some implications about the importance and relevance of modification categories in the acquisition and teaching of requests in a foreign language.