A Comparative study of the Insincere Speech Act of Inviting in American English and Iraqi Arabic

Abstract EN

People sometimes extend invitations they don't intend to be taken seriously.

Such invitations have gained different terminologies.

Levinson (1983) calls them ambiguous invitations; however Clark and Isaacs (1990) prefer to use the term ostensible invitations.

Regardless of the term used, such invitations require a number of defining features: a pretense of sincerity by the speaker; mutual recognition of the pretense by speaker and addressee; collusion on the pretense by the addressee; ambivalence by the speaker about its acceptance; and an off-record purpose by the speaker.

Linguists understand ostensible invitations as a kind of non-serious speech act in which the words and syntax of an invitation are used when a request for going somewhere or doing something is not intended.

In ostensible invitations, a speaker supposedly will invite a hearer without the intention of an invitation, but for some other background purpose.

This paper explores the similarities and differences (if there are any) across the insincere speech act of inviting (ostensible invitations) in American English and Iraqi Arabic.

The present study found out that there is a sort of sameness in terms of the defining features of ostensible invitations in American English and Iraqi Arabic.