Insults are prototypical means to express impoliteness in social interactions. In film they are prime ways of staging conflict or jocular abuse, reflecting everyday communicative practices while contributing to the emotionality of dialogue, characterisation and plot advancement. Both original and dubbed films offer a privileged perspective to…

This study explores how a group of learners of English as a second language (ESL) criticize in everyday situations compared to the native speaker (NS) with a view to expanding the range of speech acts under inquiry in the interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) literature. Data were collected from five NSs of New Zealand English and five intermediate…

The aim of the study is to identify and interpret the exact aspects of Greek interlanguage modification which present deviations from native usage. As such, it is an investigation of Greek ESL university students' request modification and a comparison to British English native speakers. More specifically, it concentrates on the mitigating function…