Expressive Speech Acts in Educational e-chats

Abstract

The category of expressive speech acts has traditionally proven elusive of definition in contrast to other types of speech acts. This might explain why this group of speech acts has been less researched. The present paper aims to redress this imbalance by analysing the expressive speech acts performed by two groups of university students in two educational chats, carried out in English or in Spanish, respectively. The main purpose of the study is to find out if students express their emotions (and which emotions) when interacting online and, if the use of their mother tongue or not affects their performance of expressive speech acts in terms of frequency and type. To this purpose, Weigand's (2010) taxonomy of speech acts was followed, since it provides a more systematic delimitation of the traditional category of "expressive acts". Her distinction between emotives and declaratives was thus applied to the dataset under scrutiny. Results show that students opt for performing declarative acts but refrain from expressing their own emotions in an educational setting. As for the use of English or Spanish, no significant differences were observed, which reveals that the use of their mother tongue does not seem to affect the kind of acts performed.Keywords: expressive speech acts, educational chat, English, SpanishResumen: Tradicionalmente, la definición de los actos expresivos ha sido menos concreta que la de otros actos de habla. Esto podría explicar por qué este grupo de actos de habla ha recibido menos atención. Este estudio tiene como objetivo equilibrar, al menos en parte, este desequilibrio mediante el análisis de los actos expresivos producidos por dos grupos de estudiantes universitarios en dos chats educativos, en inglés y español, con el fin de descubrir si los estudiantes expresan sus emociones (y cuáles) cuando interactúan online y si el uso de su lengua materna afecta su producción de actos de habla expresivos. Para ello, se ha utilizado la taxonomía de actos de habla propuesta por Weigand (2010) pues ofrece una delimitación más sistemática de los tradicionalmente conocidos como "actos expresivos". Su distinción entre actos "emotivos" y "declarativos" se ha aplicado a los datos a analizar y los resultados muestran que los estudiantes optan por producir actos declarativos pero limitan la expresión de sus emociones en un contexto educativo. En cuanto al uso del español o el inglés, no se observan diferencias significativas, lo que demuestra que el uso de la lengua materna en este contexto parece no afectar el tipo de actos de habla producidos.

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