Alejandro Cuza and Lori Czerwionka* A pragmatic analysis of L2 Spanish requests: Acquisition in three situational contexts during short-term study abroad DOI 10.1515/ip-2017-0016 Abstract: This study examines pragmatic acquisition of requests for English- speaking learners of Spanish. This research expands upon previous work by investigating the acquisition of second language requests during a short-term immersion program (6 weeks) in Madrid, Spain and in three situational contexts: food and drink, general merchandise, and familial. Data were collected using an experimental computerized oral discourse completion task. Requests made by learners (501 requests) and native speakers (224 requests) were compared con- sidering personal deictic orientation and directness of the requests. For learners, shifts from speaker-oriented to hearer-oriented requests indicated greater prag- matic development in food and drink and familial contexts. Results are dis- cussed considering pragmatic developmental stages and differential results in the three contexts. Keywords: request, speech act, second language acquisition of pragmatics, study abroad, situational variation 1 Introduction Pragmatic competence is essential to second language learners, especially in contexts where their second language is the primary language of use, as in the case of study abroad. Pragmatic competence encompasses the knowledge of pragmalinguistic resources and sociopragmatic application of those resources to second language contexts (Barron 2003). “Pragmalinguistics deals with the linguistic resources of a language which can be employed to serve a specific communicative function, e.g. the syntactic patterns which can be used to perform a particular speech act in a given language. *Corresponding author: Lori Czerwionka, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA, E-mail: czerwionka@purdue.edu Alejandro Cuza, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA, E-mail: acuza@purdue.edu Intercultural Pragmatics 2017; 14(3): 391–419 Brought to you by | Cambridge University Library Authenticated Download Date | 9/17/17 1:00 AM