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Title:
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Politeness Theory and the Directive Speech-act in Arabic-English Bilinguals: An empirical study
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Author:
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Ahmad Atawneh
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Degree Awarded:
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State University of New York at Stony Brook
, Department of Linguistics
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Degree Date:
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1991
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Discourse Analysis
Pragmatics
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Subject Language(s):
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Arabic, Standard
English
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Director(s):
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S. Sridhar
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Abstract:
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This dissertation tests the universal claims of Brown and Levinson's (1978) politeness theory. The objectives of the study were: (1) to evaluate the existing models of speech-act analysis in politeness discourse and to test their applicability to the analysis of directives performed by Arabic-English bilinguals: (2) to identify politeness strategies in Arabic and diagnose the problems that Arabic speakers may have in performing directives in English; and (3) to come up with recommendations to modify the existing models of politeness within the larger framework of a theory of discourse analysis.
In addressing these goals,an empirical contrastive study was made to investigate the requesting strategies of native speakers of Arabic and English on the one hand, and Arabic-English bilinguals on the other.The subjects in this study were: 30 American native speakers of English,30 Arabic-English bilinguals living in the U.S who responded in both English and Arabic, 30 Monolingual Arabs who responded in Arabic, and 20 Arabic-English bilinguals living in Palestine who responded in English. Their ages ranges from 20 to 60 years. The instrument was a questionnaire in Arabic and English involving twelve role-playing situations devised in pairs. Each two pairs tested the effect of one of the three politeness determinants: power, social distance and risk of imposition. The hypotheses tested were (1) Arabic linguistic patterns of politeness differ from the English patterns in structure and heirarchy due to linguistic and cultural differences; (2) such pattens are transferred from one language to another in cross-cultural communication. The results strongly support both hypotheses, and Brown and Levinson's theory. However, the results show that the theory fails to make a distinction in the rating of invitation directives in different situations. The treatment of 'silence' as a function of politeness also seems to be questionable. Therefore, it is suggested that Brown and Levinson's theory be supplemented in part by leech's (1983) model. The descriptive analysis show that Arabic employs fewer modals as hedges than English and substitutes other politeness strategies to bridge this gap. The applicability of the study to the second and foreign language learning lies in its claim that the culture in which a second or foreign language is learned shapes the pragmatic norms of that language.
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