The acquisition of pragmatic competence in ELE: the case of evidentiality

Abstract

The study examines certain resources for expressing evidential meaning in Spanish and Slovenian and analyzes how these elements support the development of communicative competences in the Slovenian university environment. First, the study focuses on some theoretical concepts related to the evidentiality and the acquisition of the pragmatic competence (discursive, functional and organizational). The theoretical framework is followed by the analysis of the systematization of certain evidential elements in various SFL manuals (CEFR levels B1, B2 and C1), and by the analysis of the acquisition of evidence particles by Slovenian students. The preliminary results show that knowledge of different ways of (non-)referencing the source of information fundamentally contributes to linguistic and pragmatic mastery of both the second language and the source language and thus to effective
intercultural communication.