TO THE QUESTION OF PRAGMALINGUISTIC MISTAKES IN A SPEECH ACT OF REQUEST
The paper reveals the issue of pragmatic transfer in speech patterns of Russian-speaking students who study English as a second language. We have carried out a linguistic experiment to examine a speech act of request using the written discourse completion test. The participants of the experiment were Russian-speaking students of the Pre-Intermediate/Intermediate level and students of Upper-Intermediate/Advanced level. The control group consisted of American students, native speakers of English. The informants were asked to express a request in the given circumstances. The study was to define the linguistic and cultural peculiarities of a speech act of request verbalized by Russian-speaking informants and American ones. Besides it was aimed at identifying the issues of pragmalinguistic and sociolinguistic transfer which occurs in the speech of Russian-speaking informants, evaluating pragmalinguistic competence of Russian students of English. The research data show, that Russian informants tend to use in English their native cultural patterns in a speech act of request. Besides in most cases they use pragmalinguistic or sociolinguistic transfer, which can deal with both grammar structure and lexical units of the language.