Requesting Strategies in English and Yemeni Arabic Dialect: A Pragmatic Contrastive Analysis

Abstract

This cross-cultural investigation aims to identify the ways in which English and Yemeni Arab speakers realize requests with special reference to politeness strategies as patterned by Blum-Kulka (1989). The main objective of this study is to make a pragmatic contrastive analysis of the strategies of requests and politeness phenomenon in the production of request speech act by Yemeni and English native speakers. It also attempts to explore and identify the nature of politeness strategies in both English and Yemeni dialect focusing on the request speech act as a measuring tool in the light of Brown and Levinson's theory (1987). It is based on the analysis of the elicited responses of 330 Yemeni Arab subjects and 20 native speakers of English. The data were collected by a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) based on that of Blum-Kulka (1982). The data corpus was obtained with 1400 requestive speech acts and each of the valid responses was analyzed separately to identify the type of strategy used. .Descriptive data such as frequencies, percentages and means were given. The prime findings of the study revealed that Yemeni Arab speakers intend to use the conventional direct strategies with constant tendency to use mood derivable request strategy accompanying with politeness markers; whereas, the native speakers of English favor the conventional indirect strategies at a high significant statistical level.