Cross cultural pragmatics requests’ use of strategy and level of directness in Palestinian Arabic and British English

Abstract EN

This paper examines the performance of request pragmalinguistically, sociopragmatically and in relation to culture in Palestinian Arabic (PA) and British English (BE).

Pragmalinguistically, the study tries to identify the level of directness and the kind and amount of strategies in both languages.

Sociopragmatically, the study relates the general level of directness to the factors of status, distance and degree of imposition.

The study tries to explain the differences between both languages with reference to some cultural concepts, such as individualism, collectivism, negative politeness and positive politeness.

For data collection, a discourse completion task was used.

The findings show that the languages are significantly different in the use of direct strategies and conventionally indirect strategies.

The factors of status, distance, and degree of imposition influence the performance of request in both languages, however to a larger extent in PA.

This might be attributed to different schemas of culture.

Speakers of BE used more strategies that show individualism and negative politeness, speakers of PA, on the other hand, used more strategies connected to collectivism and positive politeness.