Politeness strategies in complaints in Italian: A study on IFL learners and Italian native speakers

Abstract

This paper reports on an ongoing study of Dutch native speakers learning Italian as a foreign language in a guided learning context. The study compares native and non-native realization patterns of complaints, both in terms of the type of expression of judgment and the request for reparation performed (following the classifications suggested by Nuzzo, 2007), and of the use of modifiers. Special attention is given to the potential effects of learners’ language proficiency levels on the native- likeness of their realization patterns and of the quantity and variety of modifiers they used. Methods consisted of a sociolinguistic questionnaire, a written discourse completion test, and a conditional inference trees analysis of the production of 23 learners attending a B1 level course, 19 learners attending a B2 level course, and 23 native Italian speakers.