Request constructions in soninke and english: a preliminary pedagogical approximation
| Autor | Mariyamuo Nimaga Nimaga/Lorena Pérez-Hernández |
| Cargo del Autor | University of La Rioja/University of La Rioja |
| Páginas | 189-208 |
挑腸藩挽晩腸挑
CAPÍTULO 10
REQUEST CONSTRUCTIONS
IN SONINKE AND ENGLISH:
A PRELIMINARY PEDAGOGICAL APPROXIMATION
MARIYAMUO NIMAGA NIMAGA
University of La Rioja
LORENA PÉREZ-HERNÁNDEZ
University of La Rioja
1. INTRODUCCIÓN
Soninke belongs to the group of West African languages and is spoken
in many countries across this continent (e.g., Mali, Gambia, Ivory Coast
and Mauritania, among others), as well as by immigrants from these
countries established in other parts of the world. Soninke is a spoken
language with no written records and no specific code of writing (e.g.,
Allawai’ (can you) can be written as ‘an lawai, ‘ja rauai’,‘an lauai’,
etc.).
The literature on Soninke is scarce and specific linguistic studies on how
Soninke speakers perform speech acts are inexistent. Speech acts are
core aspects of language and communication since they are essential to
social and transactional interactions. Among them, directive speech acts,
as revealed by the founding fathers of Speech Act Theory (Austin, 1962;
Searle, 1975, 1979), offer speakers the possibility to get others to do
something for them. However, languages often differ as to the semantic
and pragmatic conceptualization of this directive category and as to how
this directive force is encoded in the grammar and lexicon of each lan-
guage (Leech, 2014; Pérez-Hernández, 2001, 2009, 2012, 2013, 2021).
This paper focuses on one specific type of directive speech act (i.e., the
act of requesting) and investigates (1) its conceptualization (i.e., seman-
tic, pragmatic, social and contextual characteristics) and (2) its formal
挑腸藩晩般腸挑
realizations in Soninke. It offers a comparison of those Soninke request
constructions identified in the analysis with those previously found in
English (Pérez-Hernández, 2001, 2021). The asymmetries found be-
tween the illocutionary constructicons of these two languages offers rel-
evant information that can guide the teaching of English as a second
language to Soninke speakers.
2. OBJETIVES
The general objective of this piece of research is to provide a description
of the most frequently used request constructions in Soninke and a com-
parison to those in English with a view to uncover asymmetries that
could either facilitate or interfere with the learning of English as a sec-
ond language by Soninke speakers.
This general objective can be broken down into several specific objec-
tives. The first one involves the description of the base constructions of
requests in Soninke. The second one attempts a description of the com-
bination of the base construction with the realization procedures that al-
low Soninke speakers to modulate the illocutionary force of their re-
questing acts (Pérez-Hernández, 2013; 2021) in four different situations
which vary as to their transactional (cost of the action), social (social
distance and social power of the speakers), and contextual (formal vs.
informal settings). The last objective of this piece of research is to com-
pare the request constructions that arise from our analysis of the Soninke
language to those already identified in English.
To attain these objectives, we shall make use of theoretical tools stem-
ming from previous works carried out within Cognitive Linguistics and
Construction Grammar. More specifically, our analysis exploits the no-
tion of illocutionary construction, a meaning-form pairing used for the
expression of speech acts (Pérez-Hernández, 2021). According to the
latest developments in Construction Grammar, illocutionary construc-
tions are expected to be highly frequent conceptual structures with
shared form, function, and contextual dimensions (Goldberg and Suttle,
2010; Goldberg, 2019).
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