Pragmatic competence in adolescents. A mitigation study in refusal speech acts

Abstract

In this paper, a study of pragmatic mitigation has been carried out from the analysis of a corpus of written samples that compile a simulation activity or role-play proposed to adolescent students (15-18 years old): the composition of a WhatsApp in which an invitation is rejected. The aim of this study is, on the one side, to observe the use that adolescents make of the pragmatic strategy of mitigation, and, on the other, to evaluate their pragmatic competence, from the design of an evaluation system based on the greater or lesser use of mitigation. The methodology followed so as to analyse mitigation is the one proposed by Albelda et al. (2014), in which situational, sociolinguistic and declarative variables variables are considered, as well as a list of possible procedures appointed to express mitigation forms. The results of the study state, on the one hand, the social and communicative need that people of this age group have to justify themselves when performing a refusal speech act. This is observed on the basis of the frequency of use and the type of mitigation procedures. On the other hand, the results show the existence of a representative percentage of inadequacy by default and by excess on the communicative situation, which implies a low acquisition level of pragmatic competence and which is mostly represented by males.