Analysis of Social and Expressive Factors of Requests by Methods of Text Mining

In our paper we focus on analysing textual information usage (selected politeness factors of speech act) in mother tongue and in foreign language to identify phenomena of a language consciousness transfer from the mother tongue into a foreign language communication – transference phenomena – and their impact on textual structures of politeness in chosen languages. Our aim was to make an analysis of request texts written in English, Spanish and Slovak language, where we examined the occurrence of keywords, in our case the factors of politeness in mother tongue (Slovak) and in foreign languages (English and Spanish). We examined the formulation of requests made by two different groups, requests formulated by linguists Slovak students studying English as their major subject on one side, and the requests formulated by non-linguists Slovak students studying Economy, with the knowledge of Spanish, on the other side. We used cross-tabulation analysis and association rule analysis as our research methods. The findings are interesting mainly in terms of differences in the use of politeness factors in English and Slovak language, and also the concordance in the use of politeness factors in Slovak and Spanish texts of requests.