Making Suggestions in the Workplace: Insights from Learner and Native-Speaker Discourses

Portuguese native-speaker production of suggestions in the workplace is examined and used as a background for the exploration of how heritage and non-heritage learners of Portuguese produce and perceive this speech act. Central to our analysis is how these different groups of Portuguese users attend to the demands of power and politeness in suggestion making in the workplace, with a focus on their choices of verb tense, personal pronouns and additional mitigators. Findings suggest that although there are similarities in the ways these individuals produce suggestions, native speakers and heritage learners tend to respond to hierarchical issues note systematically than non-heritage learners, especially in relation to mitigating devices and expression of agency. Also, native speakers deploy a wider repertoire of linguistic strategies than learners when making suggestions. We close this paper by discussing the implications of these findings for research and pedagogy in applied language studies in Portuguese.