Abstract
Heritage language research on politeness strategies and parental authority role has been increasing in the past few decades and pointing out mother-child bilingual interactions as an important setting for the investigation. Research reveals that the interactant choices regarding what is going to be uttered, and how, are constrained by pragmatic rules. In order to shed light on these rules in action, politeness studies have investigated the speech act of directives as a pragmatic feature that expresses the dynamics of power between the interactants as well as their agency. This dissertation aims to apply those constructs to a case study in which a bilingual mother-child dyad engages in spontaneous conversations during their daily routine at home and, by so doing, to contribute to studies on politeness in Portuguese-English interactions. Aiming to contribute to the field, this dissertation zooms in the connections between politeness strategies and detailed morphological traits that occur in verb forms in directive subtypes uttered by mother and child. Audio recordings were transcribed using the CLAN programs in the CHAT transcription format (MacWhinney, 2000). Analyzing data collected in two different mother-child conversations, the study suggests that interactional contexts influence the use of directive subtypes and that verb forms uttered in these subtypes are reliable markers of politeness strategies. From the perspective of the minority language, the cross-tabulation of the verb forms uttered by the mother with the directive subtypes reveals that the use of certain morphological traits, such as the Portuguese inflectional verb system and the deictic system of pronouns in verb phrases, are connected to politeness strategies. From the perspective of the dominant language (English), the analysis of the son’s utterances reveals mitigating and aggravating strategies mirrored in the mother’s directives and reflected in the verb choices he makes. The findings allow for better understanding of how pragmatics is intertwined with morphology, thus deepening the understanding of the complexity of politeness in a bilingual interaction.