Persuasion pragmatic strategies in L1/L2 Italian argument-ative speech

The paper aims at describing how it is possible to communicate certainty and uncertainty in L2 Italian by the argumentative macro-speech act. Specifically, in a comparative perspective with L1 Italian, the aim is to identify the pragmatic strategies carried out by non-native speakers when they argue in L2 Italian in order to persuade. We collected three corpora of argumentative speech: in L1, L2 and L1/L2 Italian. The analysis show that the non-natives seem to be skilful in expressing their judgments, but not in expanding or modifying them according to the other opinions they just heard. This is confirmed by the presence of many silences and hesitation phenomena.