Lecture: Expressing social meaning in requests

How do speakers adapt their language to different social relationships, and how does this ability develop during childhood? This talk examines how children and adults express social meaning across different communicative contexts, combining an acquisitional perspective with a cross-linguistic comparison of Swiss German and Standard German. Drawing on a range of production tasks with adults and children aged 4 to 11. The analysis explores how social distance, such as talking to a family member, friend, or stranger—as well as age and gender influences linguistic choices.

The talk focuses on lexical and morphosyntactic strategies, including pronouns, politeness markers, sentence mood, and modality. It also presents preliminary findings from a novel video elicitation task that manipulates imposition non-verbally, offering new insights into how interpersonal and contextual factors shape language use in social interactions.